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Author here, the project was originally named GitHub Notifier, however shortly after launch the legal department of GitHub contacted me and was very helpful to
by Usu 9y ago
Author here, the project was originally named GitHub Notifier, however shortly after launch the legal department of GitHub contacted me and was very helpful to guide me through resolving the issues with the naming, they even sent me a mug to compensate for the trouble of going through the name change even though I was clearly violating their terms.
- singlow 9y agoWell, GitHub doesn't own he trademark for Git, only for GitHub. They have a mutual agreement with the Git project (Software Freedom Conservancy). The Git project guidelines seem to disallow this usage: For example, imagine a software project which is only tangentially related to Git. It might use Git as a side effect, or might just be "Git-like" in the sense of being a distributed system with chained hashes. Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store.
- carussell 9y agoIt sounds like GitHub talked you out of using a name that was stepping on their own trademark and into using one which was stepping on someone else's (and that they knew about). If you're willing to share the conversations you had with them, that would be pretty interesting.