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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an expert, but something rubs me the wrong way about slapping TM on kernel, a word that already has a common technical use.

It would be like General Mills advertising its new breakfast(TM) cereal.

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Their prior branding was even worse – its used to be OS2 before they went with rabbit. OS/2 is a thing, but they went with OS2… really? My guess is it’s a relatively young technical team.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230808234114/https://www.os2.a...

My guess is this will be 90% marketing and tie ins, and 10% product, and that there ia no ‘OS’. Just a wrapper for an Android platform.

It doesn't just rub me the wrong way, it's actually bugging me. The hubris of claiming an exceptionally well-defined word in concurrent use in computing from the very beginnings of modern operating systems is staggering.

What gets me is that it isn't even an os kernel, but instead their backend.

That was the first thing that drew my eye. And it raises some questions for me.

Doesn’t it take like a year to register a trademark? If this is a fresh new startup are these things actually even trademarked?

And can you even trademark a common word like this? Is the trademark the word in that particular font?

And finally, what is the point?

Good questions. I guess if you can trademark Apple, you can trademark kernel. But just as you don't have to respect the Apple trademark when talking about apples, I doubt you have to respect a kernel trademark when talking about kernels.

> Doesn’t it take like a year to register a trademark? If this is a fresh new startup are these things actually even trademarked?

It’s not a registered trademark sign. That’s ®

Ah TIL, thanks!

TM means nothing. You can put it on anything. The R symbol however is Registered Trademark, and you can't just put that on anything.

There is a glyph for that: ™

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