No trademarks in upstream source [LWN.net]

No trademarks in upstream source

Posted Mar 3, 2025 9:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: No trademarks in upstream source by interalia
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities

> For such an old timer as you profess to be, you use a lot of all caps.

I'm enough of an old timer to remember when "all caps" was all there was! And I've reached the age where I'm a "grumpy old man" :-)

> To me, the opposite of "releasing under F/OSS licence" would be "releasing it under a proprietary licence".

Read the thread. The parent that provoked that was basically saying "if you don't want to do loads of (unpaid) work to enable other people to rip you off, you shouldn't use a FLOSS licence". I know big business has taken over large swathes of the FLOSS landscape, but we don't need to encourage them by driving the small guy out ...

Cheers,
Wol

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caps

Posted Mar 3, 2025 9:50 UTC (Mon) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

> I'm enough of an old timer to remember when "all caps" was all there was! And I've reached the age where I'm a "grumpy old man" :-)

I'm sorry but that is a very weak excuse. We've had lower case for a very long time now. The convention that all caps means shouting, and that it therefore should be used very sparingly, has existed for 30 years at the very least by now. It has been pointed out to you multiple times here. Yet you still continue to use all caps, which in my opinion shows a lack of respect for the people you want to communicate with.

No trademarks in upstream source

Posted Mar 3, 2025 10:20 UTC (Mon) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

> I'm enough of an old timer to remember when "all caps" was all there was!

Cool story bro, now since we can see you mastered the world wide web just fine, you're perfectly capable of not shouting so stop doing it every time a thread goes more than 2 comments deep.

> The parent that provoked that was basically saying "if you don't want to do loads of (unpaid) work to enable other people to rip you off, you shouldn't use a FLOSS licence".

So as I understand it, being "ripped off" here means having someone else pass their modified app as the original. I don't want to get caught up in who's being "entitled" about it, that's not really productive.

We often say FLOSS is scratching your own itch, well if the trademark use is a concern then isn't it fundamentally an itch of the upstream trademark holder? If an upstream feels strongly about their trademark being misused by a downstream, then I'd say it's mutually beneficial to both of them if it's straightforward to distribute an unaffiliated version without the trademarks, since the easier it is to do then the more likely it is that the downstreams will dutifully strip the trademark out rather than saying it's too much effort and daring the trademark owner to file suit.

But on a practical level there is one upstream and multiple downstreams, and if I was upstream and cared about this I think I'd prefer to do it once to have a consistent result rather than have each downstream distro patch the app individually at varying effort and quality levels. This is not about who's entitled to what work, but what would give me the best outcome.