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The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your trademark, the easiest solution might b
by FemmeAndroid 6y ago
The trademark has to do with licensing insofar as if a major reseller of your OSS licensed product will infringe on your trademark, the easiest solution might be to modify the license. Especially when the alternative is lengthy trademark disputes with a huge company with a lot of lawyers.
At the end of the day offering an OSS license becomes less viable when it seems like major players aren’t playing fairly.
- moonraker 6y agoTypically the standard for trademark cases is whether or not customers will confuse the two competing names/products/brands. It's quite possible that because both companies target developers, architects, etc who're more than able to distinguish between the two companies' offerings... that Elastic's lawsuits didn't go anywhere
- FemmeAndroid 6y agoSophisticated Users are definitely one factor that weight in favor of developers, but in my view it’s outweighed by the degree of similarity of the two marks, the similarity of the services, the uniqueness of Elastic as a mark, evidence of actual confusion (before reading Elastic’s complaint, I was confused by the names, and I’ve been involved in making decisions about the use of these kinds of services.)