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?
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).
[0] uspto.gov; serial number 85380218; reg. number 4125065*
[1] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html
[2] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20120902-00
* From what I could find from the USPTO website, it was submitted by
Aaron Williamson of the SFLC (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/about/team/)
This has been normal since becoming a father. I can't complain---I love being a
father. Of course, I also love hacking. I also love sleep. Knowing that my son
is going to wake me up a 6:00 in the morning has a slight influence in a
situation like this.
I'd like to just suffer through it, but being a fiancé also has another
obligation: going to bed when your significant other decides that it's bed time
(and by ``bed time'' I mean sleep). I still manage to fit it in somehow.
I don't. This is just some place safe to store random thoughts that people
probably don't care about (like most comments on most social networking
services), with the added benefit of distributed backup, a simple system and no
character limit.
All the thoughts are commit messages; in particular, this means no versioning.
That's okay, because I'm not going to go back and modify them, but I do want
dates and I do want GPG signatures (to show that it's actually me thinking this
crap).
This isn't a journal.
This will mostly be a hacker's thought cesspool.
This isn't a blog.
Though, considering how much I ramble (look at this message), certain thoughts
could certainly seem like blog entries. Don't get the two confused---one
requires only thought defecation and the other endures the disturbing task of
arranging the thought matter into something coherent and useful to present to
others.
Yeah. Enjoy. Or don't. You probably shouldn't, even if you do. If you don't,
you probably should just to see that you shouldn't.
Mike Gerwitz