This is not a good trend
This is not a good trend
Posted Mar 27, 2025 9:02 UTC (Thu) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693)In reply to: This is not a good trend by amarao
Parent article: Fedora discusses Flatpak priorities
In this case, you're talking about "trademark" , not "patent".
In brief, trademark law deals with names/logos etc. that identify the creator/purveyor of a product (protecting consumers from getting the wrong thing and creators/purveyors from reputation damage) while patent law deals with inventions, giving inventors a temporary monopoly over the market for their invention in exchange for making the invention available for others to replicate once three patent period ends.
For completeness, copyright is the third "intellectual property" law often conflated, which gives creators a monopoly over copying/performing the work, and the fourth (less spoken of) one is "trade secret" which provides protections against ”secret recipes" being leaked, but it's really rather different from the other three, and doesn't make much sense in a context with published source code(!)
There are details I've glided over, but that's the general gist...
