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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

The curl author writes in the linked article that Google has a right to do this both morally and legally. He should check with a trademark lawyer immediately since they don't have a right to pick such a confusing name and the curl trademark is probably strong enough to be enforceable even in unregistered form. (I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I have been involved in administering and enforcing other open source trademarks.)

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While that may be the case, given that he says they are _morally_ within their rights to do it implies that he won't want to consider a trademark dispute.

(Also, just to point out, lawyers cost money, and I wouldn't want to pick a fight with Google's lawyers if I didn't have to)

He may have been considering just the moral rights to fork and ship a derivative, not the confusing naming which he called out himself in the article. But indeed it's possible he doesn't care about sustaining or enforcing the curl trademark. Or he didn't know how the trademark laws can still apply without a formal registration.

And you're right, Google legal is not easy to go up against. But maybe they haven't yet been consulted on this plan and would agree with a politely but firmly worded letter from him on the naming question specifically. The original public source of these Google plans is merely an issue in the Chromium bug tracker, not yet a fully vetted blog post or press release.

That's a very fair point.

Though it would probably be prudent to try sending an email with "hey, do you mind changing your name to something else" first.

Then again, given the article and a bit of HN Buzz, that may already be happening.

Definitely worth you pointing out the rights that the author likely has in the comments though.

Yes, an informal first approach is generally best, agreed. My suggested trademark lawyer consultation was not meant to bypass that, but merely to advise on it and to assist with any subsequent steps that the situation may merit.

I wish Google learned from Go/Golang (i.e., where a nontrivial number of people refer to Go as Golang, much to the displeasure of some of the authors) and use names which are easy to search for.

I'm not looking forward to people mistyping libcrurl as libcurl and people having to second guess what the intention was.

curl might not be a trademark but EU has 'moral right of the author' rules. In my mind libcrurl is right up there with a search engine named G00gle or a software company named MikeRowSoft.

EU rules aren't the only relevant ones, either. They are certainly among the relevant ones since the curl author is in Europe, but Google has enough ties to the US that he can probably benefit from whichever set of trademark laws are more favorable. And US laws recognize unregistered trademarks too.

For whatever reason, "alternative" languages seem to have weird naming issues.