If you didn't see it, there was another email sent out that discusses this and other issues with the Git mark [0] The trademark policy can be found at [1] A f

If you didn't see it, there was another email sent out that discusses this and other issues with the Git mark [0] The trademark policy can be found at [1] A few quotes to summarise: ---- We approached Conservancy in Feb 2013 about getting a trademark on Git to ensure that anything calling itself "Git" remained interoperable with Git. While the original idea was to prevent people from forking the software, breaking compatibility, and still calling it Git, the policy covers several other cases. One is that you can't imply successorship. So you also can't fork the software, call it "Git++", and then tell everybody your implementation is the next big thing. Another is that you can't use the mark in a way that implies association with or endorsement by the Git project. To some degree this is necessary to prevent dilution of the mark for other uses, but there are also cases we directly want to prevent. The USPTO initially rejected our application as confusingly similar to the existing trademark on GitHub, which was filed in 2008. While one might imagine where the "Git" in GitHub comes from, by the time we applied to the USPTO, both marks had been widely used in parallel for years. So we worked out an agreement with GitHub which basically says "we are mutually OK with the other trademark existing". So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist. ---- I too have come across the Git/GitHub confusion far too many times, and it is extremely unfortunate. The worst aspect in my opinion is that because of this confusion a lot of the beauty and utility of Git, as a truly distributed version control system, is missed or not understood; it's assumed that using Git is the same thing as storing your code on a specific hosted service. That said I think the Git Project Leadership Committee is doing a fantastic job and have never had cause to question any of the decisions they've made nor the direction they seem to be taking the project, in this issue and others. [0] http://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/ http://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@... [1] https://git-scm.com/trademark https://git-scm.com/trademark