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Comment by webprofusion | Hacker News Reader

When making an alternative to something, don't reference the name of the thing you're copying if that thing has (or can afford) a legal team to protect their brand. If your product can reasonably be confused with the original (it can) they will eat your soul.

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Huh? So reactos shouldn't say they build an alternative to Windows? As long as you build it yourself and don't steal any resources or secrets, there is no problem mentioning that it's an alternative or replacement for another product. What's much more dangerous is picking a name for your own product that resembles the original.

Wonder how Gitlab survived next to Github then. To first approximation, the names are the same, and so are the products...

Both of these are built on top of git, an open source project, so Gitlab is not a riff on Github. Perplexica on the other hand seems like a direct reference to Perplexity, not on the concept of being perplexed by something.

Isn't "Perplexity" itself a direct reference to a machine learning term that, among other things, is very relevant to large language models, on top of which Perplexity is built?

That's a far more tenuous link than "gitlab hosts git repos".

Yet the way git is used is still similar. Both lead with ‘git’ in their name, both append a pithy three letter suffix to ‘git’ that both describe some kind of space where people meet to do stuff. Surely that’s more than just coincidence.

The dispute happens only if one party owns the trademark and sends a Cease & Desist letter. Different companies have different approaches to aggression here.

Second, it has to prove that it confuses customers (e.g. if you pick ten end users and do tests if they find that confusing). Maybe a sophisticated tech audience is better at finding differences than the general public.

Git is a registered trademark of neither GitLab or GitHub. Both GitLab and GitHub have negotiated the usage of the Git trademark. Provided they follow the rules set out for them, they can continue to use it.

As an employee of one of them I personally bought the git.new domain. I paid a good chunk for it and was going to build a new project template builder on it. I got.. talked too by legal about this. Because as an employee it actually violated one of those rules.

So that’s the how, and why I know.

More that they should not have called it Windowz

You can reference the competitor, but you don't want there to be any risk that a moron in a hurry might confuse your product with theirs, else you're in for a trademark violation.

Actually I loved it. I dont think they have any grounds to sue. Its different and close enough. Also they wouldn’t sue a project on github, if they do they show their faces its worse for them. Also many forks will happen and they have to sue many. Worst case you change the name of the repo. Thats the power of open source ;)

Isn't Yuzu a good counter example?

It does not sound relevant to me, because that was a case of "video game piracy". It was not about the name per se.

Yuzu’s downfall was not the repo, it was their Discord. They were sharing DRM cracking keys on there and getting paid $30K/month on Patreon. It’s the same reason most emulators require you to bring your own BIOS.

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