thoughts/post/2012-10-06-trademarks-in-fr...

# Trademarks in Free Software

The use of trademarks in free software has always been a curious and unclear
concept to me, primarily due to my ignorance on the topic.

Trademarks, unless abused, are intended to protect consumers' interests---are
they getting the brand that they think they're getting? If you download Firefox,
are you getting Firefox, or a derivative?

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Firefox is precicely one of those things that has brought this issue to light
for me personally: the name is trademarked and derivatives must use their own
names, leading to IceCat, IceWeasel, Abrowser, etc. Even though FF is free
software, the trademark imposes additional restrictions that seem contrary to
the free software philosophy. As such, it was my opinion that trademarks should
be avoided or, if they exist, should not be exercised. (GNU, for example, is
trademarked[^0], but the FSF certainly [does not exercise it][1]; consider GNUplot,
a highly popular graphing program, which is not even part of the GNU project.)

[This article][2] provides some perspective on the topic and arrives at much the
same conclusions: trademark enforcement stifles adoption and hurts the project
overall.

I recommend that trademarks not be used for free software projects, though I am
not necessarily opposed to registering a trademark "just in case" (for example,
to prevent others from maliciously attempting to register a trademark for your
project).

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html
[2]: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20120902-00

[^0]: uspto.gov; serial number 85380218; reg. number 4125065.
      From what I could find from the USPTO website, it was submitted by
      Aaron Williamson of the SFLC (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/about/team/)
Generate slug from post filenames Rather than having Pandoc generate the id, which has the potential to change over time and cause 404s, let's just generate the slug from the filename so that the ids will never change. This also solves the awkward question of what the filename should be, since it was previously something arbitrary. This mass rename was accomplished via this simple shell script: for p in *.meta; do slug=$( recsel -P slug "$p" \| xargs basename ) mv -v "${p/.meta/.md}" "${p:0:10}-$slug.md" done with minor manual tweaks where I saw fit. Of course, now I have some pretty long filenames, which is undesirable. The next step is to compare it with the slugs currently on mikegerwitz.com and make them match. That's the next commit, and should be pretty simple. 2019-01-08 01:07:25 -05:00			`# Trademarks in Free Software`

			`The use of trademarks in free software has always been a curious and unclear`
			`concept to me, primarily due to my ignorance on the topic.`
Convert posts to markdown files This was considerable effort, and took a bit more time than I had hoped. While newer posts were written with Markdown, previous ones were writen with my own Markdown-like formatting, but they had enough differences that it was quite an effort to get things updated. I also checked the HTML output of each, though I didn't read every article in detail. Some of these were more substantial than others; National Uproar, for example. These conversions were markup translations: the actual text remains unchanged, except in one minor instance to add text for the sake of providing some text to hold a link to a quote. Any changes to post text will happen in future commits so that the diffs are clearly visible. 2018-12-17 23:31:08 -05:00
			`Trademarks, unless abused, are intended to protect consumers' interests---are`
			`they getting the brand that they think they're getting? If you download Firefox,`
			`are you getting Firefox, or a derivative?`

			`<!-- more -->`

			`Firefox is precicely one of those things that has brought this issue to light`
			`for me personally: the name is trademarked and derivatives must use their own`
			`names, leading to IceCat, IceWeasel, Abrowser, etc. Even though FF is free`
			`software, the trademark imposes additional restrictions that seem contrary to`
			`the free software philosophy. As such, it was my opinion that trademarks should`
			`be avoided or, if they exist, should not be exercised. (GNU, for example, is`
			`trademarked[^0], but the FSF certainly [does not exercise it][1]; consider GNUplot,`
			`a highly popular graphing program, which is not even part of the GNU project.)`

			`[This article][2] provides some perspective on the topic and arrives at much the`
			`same conclusions: trademark enforcement stifles adoption and hurts the project`
			`overall.`

			`I recommend that trademarks not be used for free software projects, though I am`
			`not necessarily opposed to registering a trademark "just in case" (for example,`
			`to prevent others from maliciously attempting to register a trademark for your`
			`project).`

			`[1]: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html`
			`[2]: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20120902-00`

			`[^0]: uspto.gov; serial number 85380218; reg. number 4125065.`
			`From what I could find from the USPTO website, it was submitted by`
			`Aaron Williamson of the SFLC (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/about/team/)`