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Comment by zimablue | Hacker News Reader

There's already a mentat, name change please

Having recently been involved in trademarking some company assets, it seems that the rule of thumb is that it's ok to use a name if it's not already taken by a competing company or service. This is also particular to a region. Finding a good name that works across the world is a headache.

There will be tons of overlap in open source software, always. No point in getting upset about it. Most of the time, the purpose of the software is completely different.

That being said, I think this is a good rule of thumb out of courtesy and good judgement, even if trademarks are not involved. It just leads to dilution of both brands/projects, if they are similar enough in what they do.

For this, I'm only aware of Mozilla's Project Mentat [1], but no problem there.

1: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

Mentat was also a company in the early 90s, they made a portable STREAMS implementation that was used in MacOS Open Transport, among other OSes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentat_Portable_Streams

The name Mentat is derived from the Dune universe.

Quoting: "A Mentat is a fictional type of human, presented in Frank Herbert's science fiction Dune universe. In an interstellar society that fears a resurgence of artificial intelligence and thus prohibits computers, Mentats are specially trained to mimic the cognitive and analytical ability of electronic computers." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentat

Mozilla Firefox was originally called Mozilla Phoenix. Briefly after, its name was Mozilla Firebird, even though there was already an open source database called Firebird. So Mozilla eventually changed the name to Mozilla Firefox. I don't see how Mozilla Firebird and Firebird the open source database competed.

Not a lawyer but naming conflicts usually apply when things are in the same sector, not just when they are “competing”. Apple Computer and Apple Records are in completely different sectors, so that’s fine. You could not call a company “Apple” if you sold electronic parts, as that is too similar in the sector to Apple Computers, even if you’re not directly competing.

Is it trademarked?

It's from the book series Dune. A fictional name for humains trained to be computers. A bit like the word "hobbit" from LotR

There are three active trademarks on that name in the US alone. One is from Otsuka Pharmaceutica and might have some overlap with a chat program (you only register trademarks for certain product categories, so you can have Apple computers and Apple Music, as long as they don't sell similar products)

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