On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 10:46 AM Arthur Heymans arthur@aheymans.xyz wrote:
Hi
Thanks for the reply.
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.
Language is not a set in stone thing. There are default grammatical rules on how to write things and sometimes it is worth it to override the rules as I explained. It's basically a trade-off. There is no right and wrong here, except maybe from a trademark perspective, which most people are unaware of. Later I make the case that even from a trademark perspective I don't think it matters. I'm making the case that enforcing to write "coreboot" lowercase has more downsides than upsides, which is why I propose to allow "Coreboot" at the start of a sentence. Personally I think educating people about a trademark thing is superfluous work. Also in my personal communication it's a conundrum. For instance if I write a blog post I don't want to look like I'm making silly grammatical mistakes to those that haven't looked into the trademark registry (which almost no one does). At the same time I don't want to explain the trademark either as I think it blunts communicative efficiency.
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.
So currently the only reason lowercase coreboot is enforced is because that's how the trademark was obtained. I'm using the argument that trademark interpretation is typically broad and allows for using an uppercase letter at the start of a sentence since that's what grammatical rules want. So I think "Coreboot" is very much covered by the "coreboot" trademark.
This matches my understanding that trademarks cover variations of font, size, color, and combinations of upper/lowercase lettering. No need to be overly pedantic about writing "coreboot" versus "Coreboot" etc. so long as the project is not misrepresented. If a company tries to sell a product called "CoReBoOt" or something then we'll C&D them.
We should probably use `coreboot` in areas internal to coreboot, such as our documentation, but I wouldn't ding people for using `Coreboot` in casual contexts such as forums, commit messages, etc.