Second, as far as I can find through the French IP office (INPI), OpenText (single word) is trademarked as a figurative trademark (meaning they are basically protecting the image of the logo), not a verbal trademark.[0]
Which is what you typically do when you know that your trademark is too likely to be rejected (as being too descriptive), but you want to give it a semblance of protection.
So, no, I wouldn't assume they have been treated better.
[0] https://data.inpi.fr/search?advancedSearch=%257B%2522checkbo...
https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview/results?page=1&pageSize...
- one is "OpenText The Information Company" which seems perfectly fine. It's not descriptive of a category of "things"
- another is "OpenText Elite" : same comment
- and the last is the original "OpenText" French trademark from 1991, which expired 25 years ago.
It's entirely possible that it went through in '91 because, again, an "open text" isn't something that makes a lot of sense at the time of Minitel and typewriters, but could maybe be rejected today (which is why they now use a figurative trademark)
The legal situation may have changed since 1991. For example: The ruling refers to "Regulation 2017/1001", which, as the name suggests, only came into force in 2017.
In contrast, open text is not descriptive in the sense of being a category of things. Therefore there is no risk that competitors would run into trademark issues by just describing their products.
Also, trademark decisions are always contextual to their time. Today’s meaning of ‘open’ in the context of software and data was not even coined in 1991, at that time people used ‘free software’ as term. Today I am not sure if ‘open text’ could still be trademarked.
See my edit. "Open Systems" also had an independent descriptive meaning. The phrase "open systems" was a very common generic phrase in 1990s when companies talking about POSIX compliance was a big deal. (E.g. Microsoft touted POSIX in Windows NT.)