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> the Python Software Foundation won't let them use the name Python That's how trademarks are supposed to work; they must go after anyone using without permiss
by slig 10y ago
> the Python Software Foundation won't let them use the name Python
That's how trademarks are supposed to work; they must go after anyone using without permission or they lose it.
- true_religion 10y agoOr they could give permission.
- rbanffy 10y agoAnd have a confusing set of different and incompatible languages with the same name? People are complaining about Python 3 being named Python because some code breaks under it. That would be hell.
- true_religion 10y agoYou already have Python 2. This is a continuation of it that is simply closer in semantic to Python 3. How could it be bad if apart from the Unicode semantics the two versions became equivalent?
- rbanffy 10y agoThere is no guarantee the two branches would converge. Some things that are very useful are backported to 2, but others are just too much work.
- takeda 10y agoThe reason you have a trademark is to enforce rights to the name and prevent confusion. If suddenly Python 2.8 would appear it would be easily confused for official release. If it had flaws they often would also land on the official release. That's why if you want to make a fork you're free to do so, but you need to make a different name. If it's something people desire it will be used, you can't just ride on the popularity of the name. If your fork has different name and is not popular, it means that there was not much interest in it, period. Some of successful forks: openOffice -> LibreOffice MySQL -> MariaDB ZFS -> OpenZFS