Jade, Node.js template engine, is being forced to rename due to trademark | Hacker News Reader

Jade, Node.js template engine, is being forced to rename due to trademark

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To be fair, I was rather confused when reading the title. I tough the original JADE was being sued. Now most Google results are related to new JADE lang. Obviously, there is a trademark issue. The fact that HN seems to like this new JADE more should be irrelevant. I am surprised to witness such a biased reaction here.

Ok, let's add "Node.js template engine" to the title. That's the project's self-description at https://github.com/pugjs/jade.

We also changed "lawsuit" to "trademark" in the title, since it's not clear that there's a lawsuit and it is clear that there's a trademark.

The title is much clearer now. However, the need for such adjustments sort of support the argument that the orignal JADE trademark needs to be enforced in order to prevent confusion.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11004716, hope they try to enforce that.

I saw what you did. I don't think it is particularly productive nor mature. Aside from that, I don't care enough about either JADEs to contribute further to the debate.

Edit: I meant productive in the context of the current litigation. I am not supporting any side in this argument. I am, however, supporting the right of the JADE company to try to enforce their trademarks.

It took 1 hour of my day to stand up for something. It was very productive, reminded me of how to setup CNAME's and domains very quickly for MVP's, and I made a lot of people laugh (and reckon that they too shouldn't give in to unenforcable nonsense like this, especially with trademarks that are ABANDONED). 2000+ NPM packages, 100's of blog posts, tons of references, and all this was going on for years. Are you really supporting these people? This isn't a debate, it's pure hilarity :).

Exactly - this is literally the correct use of trademark law. HN having a tantrum about it speaks poorly of the posters here.

No, it is not.

If the purpose and correct use of trademarks is not to be a legally-protected unique identifier to prevent confusion amongst products of the same type/class or in the same market, then what, pray tell, is it's correct use?

If it was, why would companies be allowed to sell/sub license trademarks without the underlying product?

The purpose of trademarks is to protect consumers, not companies.

From what I can tell about the trademark owner in this case, they make logistics software for shipping. I fail to see how a consumer could confuse that with an HTML template engine.

It's past time to recognize that 'software' is way too broad a category for a single trademark. As 'software eats the world' and more and more industries are automated, we need to break that down into more granular categories.

I don't know much about the original JADE company, but from their website "JADE 7 is a robust development platform for business applications" where programmes are written in the JADE language.

This is obviously an issue when searching for JADE tutorials or hiring JADE programming experts for instance.

Trademarks don't guarantee Google search results. They're supposed to protect against confusion on the part of the consumer. You don't have to be a genius to understand that an open source library isn't a commercial product.

This legal threat is solely because Jade, the trademark holder, is losing the popularity contest with Jade, the open source library. They're trying to buy their way to the top of Google search results with lawyers.

Their trademarks in the US are at least abandoned - therefore not enforcable. In the UK I'm not sure how NZ TM law applies, or where Jade was originally created (Canada).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADE_(programming_language)

Seems pretty likely to cause confusion.

Not really - first the other jade doesn't do node templates and secondly jadejs has been around for quite some time, which would invalidate the other trademark.

Such a joke. Good luck to that company, they can come over to Canada and sue me as well, one person isn't solely responsible for a project so that's unfair to pin it on Forbes. I've never even heard of their lame product, make yourself look really bad, that will help!

Also (our) Jade has been around for many many years, do they really have the legal grounds to do this now?

Heh, way back I got a letter from them too. I was talking about an integrated Java Application Development Environment (JADE) at the time. It was sort of a unikernel with all the Java system classes compiled into code and only the application classes (policy) being interpreted by the JVM.

I'm really disappointed to see this happening. Studying computer science in Christchurch, New Zealand made Jade Software a well-known name to me. They've never been a modern or progressive company, but I used to respect them for their successes. Now I just feel like they're letting themselves and a big OSS community down with this petty trademark dispute.

Bad form, Jade.

I use to work for an OSS company in Wellington. I can only imagine the crazy garbage going around the company e-mail list over this. (When Microsoft and Cyanogen partnered on some things, people there went ape shit).

That agreement he's being asked to sign is worrying. Either don't sign it or, if you must, ensure it contains wording to the effect of removing all references will be done on a good faith, best-effort basis. Otherwise, one missed mention could expose you to liability.

Yeah it's a bad idea to just sign random shit that random assholes send. Certainly one has no duty to so. In this case the assholes are not even in the same hemisphere as these maintainers. Having already harvested the bad PR involved in the name change, how likely is it that they'll spend five figures to get any sort of lawsuit going? It's not as though signing this makes a lawsuit less likely anyway.

That's funny. I'm old enough remember them as a 4GL company and solution. I passed on them specifically because they were tied to Windows platform. Others, like Omni and WINDEV, could do multiplatform already. Most market share went to database-style ones like PROGRESS and INFORMIX.

Funny to see they're fighting for the trademark when even most 4GL users didn't give a shit about their product. What a lame company.

I miss 4GL (and Vim) (and Christchurch).

Haha. WINDEV is actually going fairly strong by 4GL standards for today's environment. Still buggy as hell with All Features No QA focus per forum comments. Yet, they're still doing good on ease-of-use, all-in-one, RAD concept. I remember seeing that making a web app Ajax was basically a checkbox and then re-generates it.

A modern solution like that applying good QA and what we've learned in tooling/language design would still be a good thing I think. Especially considering all the lay people out there relying on Excel, VB6, etc. Could raise them up a bit with right design.

TM law doesn't apply here to this bully. Not competing. The customers of Jade Software will not be confused. Don't give in to this BS.

Quoting from the link:

"Do we really have to change the name?

Yes. The stress of pursuing this through the courts would be too high. I would much rather focus my efforts on writing great software, and supporting the people who use pug."

You can't expect an OSS project to fight this kind of bullies in court. Yes, they are bullies, but sometimes giving in to BS is the best option.

but at least wait for them to take you to court. There are lawyers out there who will write an angry letter back. The FSF might even have people who will take this up.

I just purchased jadesoftware.org and jadelang.net. They can have fun fighting me now too. See https://github.com/pugjs/jade/issues/2231

Pushing up the sites now (editing CNAMES), will comment again here and on GH issue when they're up.

The maintainers (in their FAQ) specifically said they don't want to fight this. They're ready to move on and keep working on the project they love. Don't make their life harder.

Do you expect 2000+ packages in NPM to be renamed?

Also I just got http://jadeworld.org and am going to make a parody site out of it, then post it on Hacker News here for upvotes.

Are childish provocations like these really a good idea when the authors of Jade wanted to avoid a law suit?

Total nonsense. Legal "threats" are just that - threats. They're not legally binding in anyway. It costs nothing to send them, but gives lawyers a way to manufacture some billable time.

Send these to /dev/null and never think twice about them.

What does jadeworld even do? I'd go to their website to find out but it seems to be down...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADE_(programming_language)

Suddenly the whole trademark thing seems a lot more reasonable.

No no no. Fight them. We are more.

I'm worried about how many people here seem to have a (at best) tenuous understanding of the trademark system.

My new programming language will be called "nodes".

How will this affect the npm packages which depend on Pug/Jade? Will Jade be a metapackage which only depends on pug?

http://jadeworld.org, http://jadelang.net, and http://jadesoftware.org are now live. The name Jade for a templating language is not going away anytime soon, at least for my usage.

Good job! The open-source community cannot let trolls like this win so easily. Now we need to push them up the search rankings.

How thre fuck is a company that's existed before most posters on HN were born a "troll"?

Troll as in attacking an open source project that is very unrelated just because of a similar name.

The company in question seems to be a software company that develops a programming language called JADE. These usages are not "very unrelated" and the name is "the same", not "similar".

The "Jade" of which anyone has ever heard has been around for over five years. What took these people so long to file suit? How long does it take to constitute a failure to police one's trademark?

That's what I'm wondering as well, our Jade has been at the top of Google for many many years now.

This is not up to HN to decide, it is up to the court.

Unfortunately, we will never know since the new JADE language maintainers agreed to the terms of the old JADE software company.

Which court is that?

It's up. http://jadeworld.org/

I also just posted a Show HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002843 for this.

400 Bad Request

This was unexpected and hilarious. I literally laughed out loud. Good work

Thanks to this traffic generated, their site went down. https://i.imgur.com/8Its1a2.png

https://web.archive.org/web/20160128220329/https://www.jadew...

Best thing ever hahah

It's easy to take five minutes to search the online US trademark database before settling on a name. Of course that's not exhaustive, but it would have avoided this situation.

Only the US trademark database?

Jade Software shows up as dead in that database. Hmmm.

This seems rather important.

Jade Software are a New Zealand-based company. They've been around for decades.

I'm not from America, the project originated in Canada. I'm not seeing it in our DB (unless I'm searching wrong). Time for a foundation maybe? Sucks that open-source contributors have to pay for stuff like this.

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