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Comment by mubou | Hacker News Reader

It's worth pointing out that mermaidchart.com is NOT the official Mermaid project (https://mermaid.js.org/).

They're a for-profit company using the Mermaid name.

This creates a lot of confusion whenever the name comes up, which I suspect is deliberate.

Just to draw more attention to the point, it's not an unrelated project simply "using the Mermaid name," it's a for profit project started by the creator of mermaid.js, which charges for some advanced tooling around the opens source project. It's a common enough paradigm to see and in my opinion a pretty virtuous way to fund open source development.

See also Redis labs, Gitlab, ElasticSearch...

It's pretty instinctive to name stuff like this, especially when it's not a general purpose solution like you're not downloading this for any other reason except to build upon what Mermaid does.

They could have called it something entirely different, and then they can say (vscode plugin for mermaid.js) every time they mention their unique name that carries no association with it.

And Mermaid could have decided they want exclusive use of the name and trademarked it half a decade ago.

So it's just fair use, isn't it?

The problem is that a lot of people will google mermaid chart, or come across an extension like this, and find a site that looks like the official website and docs but isn't; it's a paid product with no relation that's simply profiting off of the name. That's deceptive, regardless of whether it's "fair use" or not.

Honestly, I'm surprised anyone on HN would defend that sort of behavior.

> And Mermaid could have decided they want exclusive use of the name and trademarked it half a decade ago.

If you do not trademark your name then I can only assume you do not want exclusive control of that name - I certainly wouldn't assume you want the protections a trademark grants.

"You didn't register your trademark, so I guess you don't care if I use it!" Setting aside mermaid here, that line of thinking is not only legally precarious but heavily unethical. In the US at least, trademarks are implicit, like copyright. Registering a trademark can help in court, but it's not required.

I'll cede it might be precarious but the whole point of having trademark protections you apply for is by definition contingent on not having those protections if you don't apply for them. If you don't apply for them and someone else uses the name too why should you care?

To me it sounds like when open source project resenting a very-permissive license just after someone else turns it into a profit machine. Kind of sucks but also the whole point of that permissive license is you shouldn't care.

Mermaid.js.org links directly to Mermaid Chart, and there is a blurb on the org site that says, "Mermaid + Mermaid Chart... Mermaid Chart is a major supporter of the Mermaid project."

Well, at least they're supporting the project and they're ok with it.

It's not uncommon for companies to piggyback off an open source project's success and mislead people into thinking it's theirs. Seemed an awful lot like that was the case here.

This. On the Mermaid Chart site they say: "By the creators of Mermaid JS" I don't know the details but assuming they're being truthful, there definitely appears to be a tight relationship.

Hi, I wanted to add some clarification on this topic.

I am Knut Sveidqvist, the inventor of Mermaid and creator of the Mermaid open-source project. I'm also the co-founder of Mermaid Chart.

To address the confusion: Mermaid Chart is not a separate entity "profiting off the name" - it's a commercial offering I created to help sustain the open-source project. Working on Mermaid during evenings and weekends became unsustainable as the project grew. Mermaid Chart allows me to work on what I love full-time while providing resources back to the open-source project. This support will continue to grow as our business matures.

I appreciate your concern about protecting users from deceptive practices. In this case, there is a direct connection between the open-source project and the commercial offering, created by the same founding team.

Thanks for the clarification! Glad you can cater to both worlds.

For diagramming and even UI prototyping I keep getting back to plain old ascii drawings though. Asciiflow.com is fantastic. I just wish they had vim keybindings. It's also great to embed in .md too. Could mermaid generate ascii? It just seems easier to comprehend and doesn't need a separate renderer.

No it can not. That's an interesting idea, though, but one would need to navigate/differentiate between the rendered output text and the Mermaid diagram code.

> Honestly, I'm surprised anyone on HN would defend that sort of behavior.

Saying "that's legal; if they didn't want it to happen they'd have trademarked" is the correct response. We can socially shame a behaviour on a random comment section on the internet, or we can actually provide the solution to all future people: trademark it if you want it.

Love mermaid. And for me mermaidchart.com was synonymous with mermaid markup. Thank you very much! I didn’t know the official website of the project is https://mermaid.js.org/ Just learned from you.

They even have almost identical logos...

Mermaid Charts is the company run by Knut Sveidqvist, the original author of Mermaid [1]. I don't think it's disingenuous at all.

[1] https://www.mermaidchart.com/company

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