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Comment by chapel | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the best way they could have handled it. It protects the name from abuse while still allowing enough freedom for those wanting to use it legitimately.

They don't call Ryan Dahl a BDFL for nothing.

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What kind of abuse?

Someone registering the trademark underneath them, using the trademark for illegal activities, pretty much anything negative.

Some people seem to be alarmed and think that you won't be able to use node/node.js in your domain names, but you just need to get a license. Like with anything else.

Cool. So if/when Oracle buys Joyent they won't use the trademark for nefarious purposes?

Why not transfer it to Apache? Have people abused Apache server? Apache Lucene? Apache CouchDB?

We heard the same thing from Sun about Java. It's a slippery slope.

Anyone who puts a lot of time or effort into Node at this point and later gets burned has no one to blame but themselves.

I would prefer that node was part of a non-profit foundation of some kind rather than Joyent, but that is largely under the bridge at this point. It was discussed heavily when this change was made in november 2010:

http://markmail.org/message/wyi2r4ntzlmawp6e#query:+page:1+m...

The thing to keep in mind is that this is just a trademark on a product. It isn't a patent on the idea of a server side evented javascript engine. There is nothing stopping someone from creating another engine that works exactly the same way and that is compatible with all the current modules.

I highly doubt that Joyent is going to slinging around lawsuits as if they were a firm involved in mobile phone patents.

Node.js is MIT licensed, so no, that won't happen.

"Anyone who puts a lot of time or effort into Node at this point and later gets burned has no one to blame but themselves."

Exactly. I was getting into it, but I am going to ditch it until this is all sorted out.

Doesn't that seem reactionary and knee jerk? Do you not use countless other products because their names have been trademarked by an organization?

Um ... yeah. Anything that Microsoft touches.

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