Comment by ddtaylor
1 day ago
I don't have advice on if you should pursue "the fight" or not.
What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things. I will probably get a lot of flack for it, but an example would be Google with the Go programming language. There was an existing language already developed and being used under that name. Google wanted to call it Go for "bigger" reasons and so they did.
Who is supposed to "fight" that?
In my opinion it's the maintainers of distros and maintainers of repositories. If they want to call their thing "foo" and there is already a "foo" in the repository, that sucks, kick rocks or call yours "foo-company-thing" since you're the one creating issues. You can likewise take the responsibility of explaining to your users why "foo-company-thing" is the name in all of the Internet as a whole. We didn't create those problems and I don't want to spend any of my time "solving" them for free.
> What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things
It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.
What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?
> It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.
It's advice I have followed myself and with expense.
> What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?
In this case I would be willing to help the NPM listings stay under his control and all of the other places he is already using the name "deepkit". I would help him expand that footprint if needed. I would help amplify his voice by publishing a blog entry. I don't have a large blog, but adding your voice has value. Right now this company sees this as X risk and Y cost and those numbers are low. If they have an invalid trademark ruling they may be able to force the issue eventually in some places, but don't make it easy for them.
If a prison analogy is needed, it's not what you see in the movies. Nobody shows up to prison and does the whole "fight the biggest guy" because they want to look tough etc. In the real world that gets you stabbed in your sleep. What happens instead is bullies who can and will win the fight in the long run are deterred by having to do the work and move to the weakest targets.
I don't know how much work the adversarial company has budgeted, what they think X or Y are, etc. What I think is important is to raise the cost, which is measured in many ways besides money.