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At what point does the name of an application or project become available to be re-used? I'm not trying to troll but "Pine" in terms of applications is, and wi

At what point does the name of an application or project become available to be re-used? I'm not trying to troll but "Pine" in terms of applications is, and will always be to me, an email client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client) When the Mozilla Foundation launched their open source web browser they initially called it "Phoenix" (an apt name considering it was rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator) but changed the name to "Firefox" because in software the name Phoenix is a database. Just because Pine is "done" it's not dead. I hold the Pine email client in esteem and don't want to have to suffix it with "email client" just because someone else wanted to name their app with the same noun.

gitmagic 7y ago
I understand your concern, but it is very hard nowadays to find a totally unique name that's any good. I did a lot of research on many different names before settling with "Pine". "Pine" was not used by any competing payments or cryptocurrency apps and didn't yield any well-known products or services at the time when I searched for it. However, there are a hand full of apps using the name "Pine" on the App Store, and there's also the Pine64 project and so on. Googling "Pine" now will bring up a new game on kickstarter. But none has made "Pine" into a big trademark yet. And after all, "pine" has always been the name of a tree.