[anonymouz]

From mrmr1993's link:

> The USPTO initially rejected our application as confusingly similar to the existing trademark on GitHub, which was filed in 2008. While one might imagine where the "Git" in GitHub comes from, by the time we applied to the USPTO, both marks had been widely used in parallel for years. So we worked out an agreement with GitHub which basically says "we are mutually OK with the other trademark existing".

> (There was another delay caused by a competing application from a proprietary version control company that wanted to re-brand portions of their system as "GitFocused" (not the real name, but similar in spirit). We argued our right to the name and refused to settle; they eventually withdrew their application).

> So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist.

[tomxor]

wow... reading the git trademark policy now, it's... surprising:

> While the original idea was to prevent people from forking the software, breaking compatibility, and still calling it Git, the policy covers several other cases.

> One is that you can't imply successorship. So you also can't fork the software, call it "Git++", and then tell everybody your implementation is the next big thing.

This seems like a massive violation of the spirit of GPL... explicitly disallowing official endorsement is one thing (since that would be lying), but you shouldn't be able to stop someone going and doing their own thing and calling it git-something.

[roblabla]

The GPL says nothing about branding though. The GPL is about user freedom, the ability to let the user improve (and share improved version of) the software.

In general, people tend to confuse copyright/patent with branding. The former is about using, while the later is about naming. You can totally make the next git-killer, and base it on git. What you cannot do is name it "GitSomething" (regardless of whether it uses git behind the scenes), as that would be a trademark violation.

I personally think the policy makes sense, but I also understand that there might be reasonable arguments either side. But framing it as an "anti-GPL" thing seems disingenuous to me.

[anonymouz]

I don't think it violates the GPL, as the GPL doesn't really care about names. You still have every right to fork git, but have to call it a different name. So if you call your fork "treengler" or whatever, you'd be fine. As far as I can see, you could also still say on your website "Treengler is a fork of Git, that adds/modifies/improves... it in the following way, ...".

To me that seems to be compatible with the text as well as the spirit of the GPL. I think a similar discussion came up in the Debian project with the Firefox trademark at some point. Debian is quite picky about what it means for software to be free, and they seem to be fine with derivatives not being allowed to modify Firefox without changing the name. (At least, I think that was the end status of this discussion.)

[0x0]

That's why it's called "CentOS" and not "Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux"...

[clacke2]

Not against the spirit of GPL or free software at all. Governing the use of language and branding to promote software freedom is core to the movement.

The steward of git defining what does and does not have the git nature is completely in line with this. You want your own take on git? Go ahead, you explicitly have the four freedoms to do so, but don't muddy the waters by calling it git if you don't represent the project.

[stephenr]

> This seems like a massive violation of the spirit of GPL...

What do you mean? The gpl literally exists to restrict the rights of downstream developers.