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I have absolutely no problem with trademarks as long as they're used as consumer protection. For example, there's the whole uBlock vs uBlock Origin thing, wher

by msla 8y ago

I have absolutely no problem with trademarks as long as they're used as consumer protection. For example, there's the whole uBlock vs uBlock Origin thing, where uBlock Origin is the good one run by the original maintainer, and uBlock is run by people who had nothing to do with the original project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin Trademarks can be used offensively, and few cases were more offensive than the Linux trademark dispute back in the 1990s, when William R. Della Croce, Jr., someone with nothing to do with the Linux kernel or anything else of value, acquired the trademark to "Linux" in September 1995 and began to demand royalties from the people who did useful things with their time. It took a court case to dislodge him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2559 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2559 What Mongo did was meaningfully better than what Della Croce did, and closer to the spirit of "prevent people from confusing products and thinking stuff is from the original development team when it isn't", but I can see how it would be an unpleasant shock in the Open Source world which, sadly, usually doesn't know or do a damned thing about trademarks until some asshole forces the issue.

bodas 8y ago
It often seems like trademark lawyers must be fairly dim, as a lot of things confuse them that don't confuse anybody else.
- matt4077 8y ago
  That's a rather unnecessary ad hominem. What you should consider in your rage against trademarks is that they protect something far weaker than copyrights and patents. Trademarks are fundamentally exchangeable identifiers. They do not hold any value beyond what they are infused with due to their attachment to some company (person/organisation/...). Unlike patents, which cordon off the part of scientific reality from most, or copyright, which fundamentally relies on deadweight losses to make its mechanism work, trademarks are almost exclusively positive: there is nothing you gain from calling your product "Mongo-X" apart from the meaning the term carries based on the company creating the product. (This slightly glosses over some practicalities, such as some terms having meaning before being adopted as a trademark, or the possible depletion of combinations of letters that can be pronounced. But those are just superficial practicalities, and they are acknowledged in various limits to trademarks).

by msla 8y ago

bodas 8y ago

It often seems like trademark lawyers must be fairly dim, as a lot of things confuse them that don't confuse anybody else.

matt4077 8y ago
That's a rather unnecessary ad hominem. What you should consider in your rage against trademarks is that they protect something far weaker than copyrights and patents. Trademarks are fundamentally exchangeable identifiers. They do not hold any value beyond what they are infused with due to their attachment to some company (person/organisation/...). Unlike patents, which cordon off the part of scientific reality from most, or copyright, which fundamentally relies on deadweight losses to make its mechanism work, trademarks are almost exclusively positive: there is nothing you gain from calling your product "Mongo-X" apart from the meaning the term carries based on the company creating the product. (This slightly glosses over some practicalities, such as some terms having meaning before being adopted as a trademark, or the possible depletion of combinations of letters that can be pronounced. But those are just superficial practicalities, and they are acknowledged in various limits to trademarks).