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He may have been considering just the moral rights to fork and ship a derivative, not the confusing naming which he called out himself in the article. But indee
by jkaplowitz 7y ago
He may have been considering just the moral rights to fork and ship a derivative, not the confusing naming which he called out himself in the article. But indeed it's possible he doesn't care about sustaining or enforcing the curl trademark. Or he didn't know how the trademark laws can still apply without a formal registration.
And you're right, Google legal is not easy to go up against. But maybe they haven't yet been consulted on this plan and would agree with a politely but firmly worded letter from him on the naming question specifically. The original public source of these Google plans is merely an issue in the Chromium bug tracker, not yet a fully vetted blog post or press release.
- mijoharas 7y agoThat's a very fair point. Though it would probably be prudent to try sending an email with "hey, do you mind changing your name to something else" first. Then again, given the article and a bit of HN Buzz, that may already be happening. Definitely worth you pointing out the rights that the author likely has in the comments though.
- jkaplowitz 7y agoYes, an informal first approach is generally best, agreed. My suggested trademark lawyer consultation was not meant to bypass that, but merely to advise on it and to assist with any subsequent steps that the situation may merit.
- signal11 7y agoI wish Google learned from Go/Golang (i.e., where a nontrivial number of people refer to Go as Golang, much to the displeasure of some of the authors) and use names which are easy to search for. I'm not looking forward to people mistyping libcrurl as libcurl and people having to second guess what the intention was. curl might not be a trademark but EU has 'moral right of the author' rules. In my mind libcrurl is right up there with a search engine named G00gle or a software company named MikeRowSoft.
- jkaplowitz 7y agoEU rules aren't the only relevant ones, either. They are certainly among the relevant ones since the curl author is in Europe, but Google has enough ties to the US that he can probably benefit from whichever set of trademark laws are more favorable. And US laws recognize unregistered trademarks too.
- ergothus 7y agoYour point is very valid, but I cant even SAY it, so I havent even gotten to the typo stage. "Crurl" is in "rural juror" territory.
- chrisfinazzo 7y agoFor whatever reason, "alternative" languages seem to have weird naming issues. See also - Rust
- yesbabyyes 7y agoC, D, and C++ on the other hand... And the naming of JavaScript had certainly never caused any confusion. Let's face it, programming languages have weird names.
- josefx 7y agoThere is a non trivial overlap between the people present for the creation of C (which followed B) and the creation of Go - so there may have been something weird in the water at Bell Labs sometime around 1980. D just followed the existing convention and C++ started out as an extension on top of C. JavaScript on the other hand was an entirely intentional marketing move. Only issue was that the programmer they hired to create the language wasn't on the Java hype train.
- SomeHacker44 7y ago"Searching for libcrurl. Click here if you really meant libcurl."
- bsg75 7y ago
- Already__Taken 7y agoHe's going to have a hard time against google for the trademark after not fighting MS for aliasing invoke-webrequest by default in powershell.
- NeutronStar 7y agoBut did MS go for the name curl or did they choose a brand new name for their implementation?