Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman
github.com
github.com
Normally companies don't get to claim broad trademark protection for prefixes -- Facebook has been shut down when trying to broadly enforce its trademark against anything prefixed with "Face" -- but "Postwoman" is close enough and is marketed as a competing product in the same place.
Update: It seems the author is also worried about this. On her blog post announcing the service, someone raised the concern, and she acknowledged that it's a problem: https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m
If Postman decides NOT to pursue it, some users may simply be turned off to the fact that they decided to invade the space of Postman with a similar name. I and probably others would probably have respected a different name altogether.
If Uber got a competitor called Ubor people would probably also be annoyed.
Choosing not to pursue it can put the trademark at risk.
So even if Postman would otherwise shrug, it may need to pursue it to protect its right to the mark.
I seriously cannot imagine the word "postman" falling into genericide on this basis.
Can you point to a mark that you think was genercized in a similar fashion to what you project happening if Postman does not pursue legal action against Postwoman?
So the trademark was protected it would appear. Even though the infringing company makes a good case (laches) for selling said products without regard from the fraternities/sororities for decades (in fact, they were selling to these organizations, so they were generally aware of the company's existence and practices).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
>>>Quite simply, the view that a trademark holder must trawl the internet and respond to every unauthorized use (or even every infringing use) is a myth. It’s great for lawyers, but irritating and expensive for everyone else. And when done clumsily or maliciously, it chills free expression.
Can you point to a case even vaguely close to this fact pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
You don't necessarily need to sue competitors for being misleading, but you do generally have to show you are trying to defend your trademarks and a lawsuit is a nice expensive papertrail.
Can you specify a single one that you think is similar?
https://www.google.com/search?q=failure%20to%20protect%20tra...
Per this posting from a law firm [1], as your question is stated with the inclusion of "might" the answer is yes. Apparently it can go one of three ways: abandoning, not impacting/abandoning, or diminishing. Two of these results are bad for the trademark holder.
I'd assume a C&D letter would be sufficient to get a proper result or at least should be the first move in these matters, but I'm not a lawyer nor play one on TV or online.
[1] https://www.dbllawyers.com/can-lose-trademark-rights-dont-su...
EFF is debunked this myth many many many times I wish people would stop spreading it, as it just an excuse for Over Aggressive enforcement that companies that DESIRE to do it use to divert the bad PR, "We had no choice" sounds alot better than "We want to crush any competition"
> Second, Canonical is not “required” to enforce its mark in every instance or risk losing it. The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. […] Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.
That paragraph cites the court decision https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=950778076210138...:
> The evidence in this case shows that Metalock Corp. has and is continuing to take reasonable steps to maintain its rights in the mark, to use that mark, to license its use, to advertise it and to prosecute infringers. The owner of a mark is not required to constantly monitor every nook and cranny of the entire nation and to fire both barrels of his shotgun instantly upon spotting a possible infringer. Lawyers and lawsuits come high and a financial decision must be made in every case as to whether the gain of prosecution is worth the candle. These defendants have not proved that because of the lack of efforts by plaintiffs in "policing" use of the mark, that METALOCK has become so diluted by widespread use by others that it has lost its distinctiveness.
My interpretation is that companies do indeed have to prosecute a high enough fraction of infringements to protect their trademark, but they don’t necessarily have to prosecute a given infringement. So, for example, Postman could keep their trademark if they left “Postwoman” alone, as long as they later sued “Post Man” for infringement.
If they allow their trademark to go unprotected from an extremely blatant hit like this, their trademark might as well be worthless. Having a competing product in the market using an intentionally similar name, is a large value debasement for the Postman brand & offering (not to mention the $58m in venture capital that is betting on the value of those things).
Is Postwoman from the Postman company? They're similar products? Are they competing products from the same company? The sound you hear is millions of dollars in venture capital being flushed down the toilet.
No serious company is going to hold back on a legal response just because you staple woman/women/her/she to their existing trademarks and seek to compete head-on with their products or services.
Disclamer: I am not a lawyer but I have at least a high level understanding of trademark law.
In the case of postwoman, it's kind of hard to imagine anyone would mistake it for postman. So it's unlikely postman would win a lawsuit against it.
Ever since Postman started getting worse I switched to Insomnia and haven't looked back.
The main differences are that Paw is a native Mac app, paid, and closed source.
Insomnia is open source, cross-platform, and free to use (although there is a paid plan).
Some of Insomnia's biggest differentiators are it's GraphQL query editor (autocomplete, linting, etc) and it's ability to be customized via plugins and themes.
If an organization did this, I'd be all for it. An individual? I'd bet this is going to slow down updates to Chromium significantly, and eventually lead to either security issues or maintenance fatigue resulting in closure of the project.
I'm not saying it's 100% going to happen like that, but that's on the wrong side of my risk tolerance line for adding a tool to my everyday suite.
That tradeoff can be worth it, but all I'm getting out of it here is reduced application footprint? I'd rather use the bloated tools or wait for someone with deeper pockets to make a less bloated tool. Or a similarly small project that writes it natively.
If that concerns you, though (or if the author really did outright fork Chromium), it looks like it runs in an ordinary browser, too (e.g. via postwoman.io or localhost:3000).
> the author stripped down Chromium for the UI
If it's just CEF then I feel like that wording is misleading.
Curious to know what you feel as been getting worse with Postman?
I'm a long time user of it myself and feel it has consistently done what it says it will do without much cruft.
Going to use this instead of Postman now!
As the creator of Insomnia, I love seeing new projects like this and am really excited to see what Postwoman grows into. It looks awesome, is open source, and there's always room for more developer tools! :)
If anyone is interested in how Postwoman was developed and deployed, the author of the project did a huge write up of her tech stack today.
That's at: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-is-a-...
curl acme.org/my/resource | jq -r '.id'
I've used it often for ad-hoc requests, where there's authentication/OAuth tokens required, JSON payloads that would be a pain to put into the shell.
Obviously it doesn't negate the need for testing or replace tests, but not every ad-hoc investigation needs to be wrapped in a test.
* Non trivial authorisation
* Chained commands
* Templated requests
* Random generation of content
Also it should be good idea to get some other name. The product itself is good.
I am sad to see you get lot of attention because of gender instead of your actual work.
I've seen this before, but not quite so consistently.
git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | grep "\[doc"
Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? Here you're just typing the literal word so not much to remember or search.
:rotating_light: Lint
Why not just use "[rotating_light] Lint" as the commit message? Or even better: "[lint] Make changes recommended by foo lint\n\nThis is the foo command used: ..."
My first smartphone was a Galaxy S2, and I frequently used an emoji that looked like a character giving a sly winking-type gesture.
It took me several years to realize that this was actually the eye-rolling emoji, and every other system's implantation clearly showed this. Some of the more strange responses I received started to make sense.
Most browsers would highlight all the matches.
On top of that, emojis are much less friendly to visually impaired people.
[ticket-type]/#TICKET-[ticket-description]
bug/APP-123-prevent-auth-redirect-loop
The emoji thing is fine if it's for fun - we should all enjoy ourselves and our work a little more - but I'm hard pressed to see the practicality of it.
The first thing that comes to mind is that it takes up less space and is thus easier to scan. Also, people with visual impairments may have an easier time scanning based on color/shape rather than reading each individual line.
Also, it's just as easy to grep for ':bug:' than 'bug', or rather, it's more specific to do so. Likewise, people suggesting [bug] have to worry about whether their shell or grep is going to interpret the square brackets (they will).
git log | grep '[bug]' - does not do what you want
git log | grep [bug] - fails in ZSH; works as above in bash
git log | grep bug - matches lots of things, not just the tag
git log | grep ^bug - Doesn't work because 'git log' puts spaces in front of commit lines
git log | grep :bug: - Does exactly what you expect it to and nothing else.
That's the practicality that I see, personally.
> you don't need to worry about emojis rendering differently on different platforms
You don't really need to worry about that anyway, as long as you're generally on the same one or two platforms. A user on Ubuntu will always see the same bug, even if :bug: gives them a different bug illustration than an iOS user sees. In the git commits, it's represented as the tag (:bug:) and not the literal emoji.
Lastly, I fail to see anything that has to do with branching strategy with regards to emoji. This is purely commit messages and (in this case) the readme. Your branching strategy doesn't tell us anything about individual commits.
No, but this does work:
git log --grep ^bugSeems like it's doing the same thing here, I kind of hope to see more of it!
Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system.
One more reason to love HN
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Win-win
I certainly find many (almost all?) highly ambiguous, which is the total opposite of expressive in my opinion.
I'm aware I will sound "old man shouts at cloud" to some, but if you need emojis to express yourself, you are lacking language skills.
I personally think that first part of the readme made good use of them and kinda helped me navigate the different sections, but they're very distracting in the commit messages, H1s and the description.
Not every line needs an emoji at the beginning or end, and IMO rarely does it need both.
Emojis in text IMO are like jokes in movies. The funnest movies have them, they're placed well and they're effective. Other movies have so many of them they just pull you from the story and then you just can't relate.
Imagine trying to handle a production incident, going through such a changelog, reading "HAHA WHOOPS LIL SHINKWRAP ISSUE THERE LOL".
>
I'm not a fan.
All said I don't like the name because it puts Postman in a tough situation, keep the gender pronoun if you want just don't make it near identical to them.
Tag with [tag], use consistent spacing etc. and, make it easy on the eyes.
Same with glorified .bashrc files used to create graphic-git command prompts.
My native language also requires unicode characters to type correctly, and they create the same problems hence, I also prefer avoiding these characters.
These are my preferences, I cannot (and should not) stop the progress. However for me, simplicity and practicality is much better than fanciness.
I'd not fight over this stuff if I was contributing to a project which embraces these concepts and play along without any fuss or objection but, I won't use these in my own projects.
I'm wondering if you're referring to a different project that you've seen and were just reminded of it, or if you're exaggerating because you saw something you didn't like.
Also, using visual indicators is nothing new; Jenkins uses thunderstorms and suns to denote build status, and marketing pages are often full of images, icons, and iconography.
The reality is, the younger generation communicates differently than the older generation, and different subcultures communicate differently from each other. Maybe you take someone less seriously because of the way they communicate, but that's on you, not on them.
Have a listen to this podcast by a linguist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712
The short answer is the modern word woman has a separate etymological root than the word man. And the word man has had linguistic changes recently that mask those origins. Woman as well actually.
Man originally meant human really, and woman used to be Wifman (somewhat literally female human). Wife is a holdover from this prior to Middle english usage of the term.
Old english used wer and wif as man/woman respectively, and as you can guess Werewolf derives from the old ussage of man.
In short, its complicated and woman isn't a derivative of man. Its much more interesting than that. You can't look at the modern spelling of words to derive much on how we got to this point. You'll make a ton of categorical errors that way, especially in English given man used to just be the human race. Our modern take of man anywhere as needing to be replaced with woman depending on gender is slightly amusing once you know the etymology of the term in that regard.