Hi,
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 3:48 PM Arthur Heymans arthur@aheymans.xyz wrote:
Hi
The coreboot trademark is registered as lowercase. We enforce this in for instance commits, even when normal grammar would dictate uppercase at the start of a sentence.
This makes sense for very well known brands, companies and products like "eBay", "iPhone", "AMD". They are all very well known trademarks and they have some uppercase letter in them in atypical places. For these words grammar exceptions seems reasonable.
Coreboot is a reasonably well known as a project, but little people know about the specificity of the trademark. This often causes confusion on people either reading "coreboot" at the start of a sense, where it looks grammatically wrong, making it even look unprofessional in the eyes of some. This is because there is no other uppercase letter inside coreboot that would make it a typical exception to regular grammar rules.
People getting into the project making the mistake at the start of a sentence, might get the wrong impression of too many idiosyncrasies. On top of that it takes a non zero amount of effort on people in the project to educate others on this trademark thing.
Also trademark are typically a bit more broad than exactly how they are registered. I cannot start a company called iNTel or aMD that makes chips. I cannot put a product on the market called "IPHoNE". I think the same applies to "coreboot".
So my question is: can we relax the trademark in lowercase enforcement? I would suggest to simply allow both ways.
I am not sure if I understood you correctly.
Are you proposing to give up trying to defend the spelling of the project's name because too many people write it wrong and educating them is too much effort? If so, I think this is a self-defeating attitude and I completely disagree with it.
Or is it that the trademark only covers the all-lowercase "coreboot" spelling, so one can use a name like "CoReboot" (e.g. for something unrelated) without infringing the "coreboot" trademark? In that case, making the trademark case-insensitive makes sense.
Or is it something else? Then... *confused noises*
Arthur Heymans _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email to coreboot-leave@coreboot.org
Best regards, Angel