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By attempting to trademark WebAssembly you've outed yourself as a hostile actor. You don't then get to go and complain that the community isn't treating you we

By attempting to trademark WebAssembly you've outed yourself as a hostile actor. You don't then get to go and complain that the community isn't treating you well. They're right not to trust you. You use Oracle's JS trademark as precedent, but that's woefully ignorant of how it came about. JavaScript was not a four year old open standard when Oracle came along and scooped it up. JS was a Java branding deal between Sun and Netscape. If you want to contribute to build something good, because a strong wasm community is in your best interest, drop the attitude and don't make any more moves to sabotage the project. If you want to lawyer up and try to exploit the fruits of the community, then do that. But you need to pick a lane. I don't see Larry hanging around HN complaining about how people are treating him on GitHub. I don't have a dog in this fight. Prior to this thread, I didn't know about you, your company, or anyone in all these links you've posted except I remember reading a post by Lin Clark once. I wrote another post that I deleted pretty quickly when I realized how aggressive it sounded. But it wasn't trying to be aggressive, just convey the hostility of what you did and how you should expect people to react.

deleted 6y ago
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syrusakbary 6y ago
The Bytecode Alliance veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced, on November 12 2019 (via direct message by one of their well-known members -now working at Fastly- to a Wasmer investor). Back then, the trademark was not even filed by the lawyers (if you look to the USPTO filings), so I'm not sure how the hostile actor argument could apply here (if we really buy into that argument). As reflected in other comments in this thread, it's not in Wasmer intent to trademark WebAssembly. And we successfully course-corrected any actions way before it was even public. We have been continuously pushing the limits of WebAssembly since we were founded. The success of Wasmer as a company solely depends on the success of WebAssembly as a technology, and is on our best interest to continue pushing it forward. In fact, I'd argue that Wasmer has been pioneer in: 1. Open-sourcing the first working Rust WebAssembly runtime (wasmtime existed when I created Wasmer, but was not able to run anything [1]) 2. Creating a Package Manager for WebAssembly [2] 3. Creating WebAssembly embeddings for non-js languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, ...) 4. Running WASI fully in a browser, including an online shell [3] [1] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/142#issuecomment-461129940 https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/142#issuecomment-4... [2] https://wapm.io https://wapm.io [3] https://webassembly.sh https://webassembly.sh
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  Er... did you reply with your sock puppet by accident [1] [2]? If so that's kind of frowned on here, especially if you were using it to vote. I'm totally willing to entertain arguments that the Bytecode Alliance are also acting in bad faith. It's a harsh world and open source is not all unicorns and rainbows. But you can't just brush off the trademark issue by claiming it was unintentional. Especially when what you write here doesn't fit well with what you've written elsewhere [3]. I've gotten trademarks through lawyers before and the level of detail was an intense experience. You seem to be claiming your lawyers independently decided to trademark WebAssembly and you signed the pages without reading them? At least that's what I can put together from your vague writing about it. If you're not willing to give a concrete step by step post mortem of how such a clusterfuck happened, the community should (and I'm sure does) feel at liberty to not believe you in the slightest. You don't owe them an explanation, they don't owe you their trust. You're clearly good at technology, better than me I'm sure, and I'm no slouch. You're doing impressive work and I have no wish to downplay that. But you appear to be quite bad at getting along with people. Maybe you can make your business work without developing that skill, and if that's your plan then best of luck to you. Sincerely. [1] https://i.imgur.com/TPBH9EH.png https://i.imgur.com/TPBH9EH.png [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515476 [3] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3#issuecomment-713141554 https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3#issuecomment-71...
  - syrusakbary 6y ago
    > If you're not willing to give a concrete step by step post mortem of how such a clusterfuck happened, the community should (and I'm sure does) feel at liberty to not believe you in the slightest. You don't owe them an explanation, they don't owe you their trust. Agreed, perhaps that's the best way. > Wasmer the company might have been announced November 12 2019, but the open source project was around a year before that. I don't know what happened prior to that date to make the Bytecode Alliance members want to "veto" you as you put it, and maybe you're entirely blameless for that. As you point out, your trademark shenanigans hadn't taken place yet. But saying the "veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced" is misleading at best. I think you misunderstood. I meant that Wasmer itself was vetoed from joining the Bytecode Alliance the same day that the Bytecode Alliance was announced. Wasmer was founded way before (as a company and a open-source project). > But you appear to be quite bad at getting along with people. It's curious this is the impression caused. I'm definitely not someone with low social skills. EDIT: added an extra response

deleted 6y ago

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syrusakbary 6y ago

The Bytecode Alliance veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced, on November 12 2019 (via direct message by one of their well-known members -now working at Fastly- to a Wasmer investor). Back then, the trademark was not even filed by the lawyers (if you look to the USPTO filings), so I'm not sure how the hostile actor argument could apply here (if we really buy into that argument). As reflected in other comments in this thread, it's not in Wasmer intent to trademark WebAssembly. And we successfully course-corrected any actions way before it was even public. We have been continuously pushing the limits of WebAssembly since we were founded. The success of Wasmer as a company solely depends on the success of WebAssembly as a technology, and is on our best interest to continue pushing it forward. In fact, I'd argue that Wasmer has been pioneer in: 1. Open-sourcing the first working Rust WebAssembly runtime (wasmtime existed when I created Wasmer, but was not able to run anything [1]) 2. Creating a Package Manager for WebAssembly [2] 3. Creating WebAssembly embeddings for non-js languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, ...) 4. Running WASI fully in a browser, including an online shell [3] [1] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/142#issuecomment-461129940 https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/142#issuecomment-4... [2] https://wapm.io https://wapm.io [3] https://webassembly.sh https://webassembly.sh

reitzensteinm 6y ago
Er... did you reply with your sock puppet by accident [1] [2]? If so that's kind of frowned on here, especially if you were using it to vote. I'm totally willing to entertain arguments that the Bytecode Alliance are also acting in bad faith. It's a harsh world and open source is not all unicorns and rainbows. But you can't just brush off the trademark issue by claiming it was unintentional. Especially when what you write here doesn't fit well with what you've written elsewhere [3]. I've gotten trademarks through lawyers before and the level of detail was an intense experience. You seem to be claiming your lawyers independently decided to trademark WebAssembly and you signed the pages without reading them? At least that's what I can put together from your vague writing about it. If you're not willing to give a concrete step by step post mortem of how such a clusterfuck happened, the community should (and I'm sure does) feel at liberty to not believe you in the slightest. You don't owe them an explanation, they don't owe you their trust. You're clearly good at technology, better than me I'm sure, and I'm no slouch. You're doing impressive work and I have no wish to downplay that. But you appear to be quite bad at getting along with people. Maybe you can make your business work without developing that skill, and if that's your plan then best of luck to you. Sincerely. [1] https://i.imgur.com/TPBH9EH.png https://i.imgur.com/TPBH9EH.png [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515476 [3] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3#issuecomment-713141554 https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3#issuecomment-71...
- syrusakbary 6y ago
  > If you're not willing to give a concrete step by step post mortem of how such a clusterfuck happened, the community should (and I'm sure does) feel at liberty to not believe you in the slightest. You don't owe them an explanation, they don't owe you their trust. Agreed, perhaps that's the best way. > Wasmer the company might have been announced November 12 2019, but the open source project was around a year before that. I don't know what happened prior to that date to make the Bytecode Alliance members want to "veto" you as you put it, and maybe you're entirely blameless for that. As you point out, your trademark shenanigans hadn't taken place yet. But saying the "veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced" is misleading at best. I think you misunderstood. I meant that Wasmer itself was vetoed from joining the Bytecode Alliance the same day that the Bytecode Alliance was announced. Wasmer was founded way before (as a company and a open-source project). > But you appear to be quite bad at getting along with people. It's curious this is the impression caused. I'm definitely not someone with low social skills. EDIT: added an extra response