Clarification on the Notepad++ Trademark Issue | Hacker News Reader

Clarification on the Notepad++ Trademark Issue

notepad-plus-plus.org

185 pointsminimaxir84 comments

I don't know why people are up in arms about this.

No one is mad about the port of Notepad++ to macOS. No one is mad that someone said "I ported Notepad++ to macOS." The problem is the branding and delivery conveys the impression that the macOS port is official, which is deceptive even if deception isn't the goal.

I'm not following your comment. You say you don't know why people are up in arms about it, but then you go on to note that the author of the port is being deceptive.

I believe they meant "why people are so up in arms about the developer being so strict about enforcing their trademark," not "why are people upset that the port author is being deceptive."

Ahh, that reframe makes a lot more sense

The people were up in arms against the Notepad++ author doing something about the deception.

Which was why they felt they had to write this post. Read the article.

The difference is intent. It will deceive people whether or not the author's intent is deception.

People are upset about the deceptive misuse of the trademark. Rightfully so, it’s deceptive and misleading, legal issues aside.

Linked post that shows what the mac port website originally looked like makes this pretty clear https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/npp-trademark-infringemen...

GPL and other licenses allow you all sorts of leeway with the code but not the name and branding of the product the code is running.

Yikes. They even placed his name and bio on the Notepad++ for Mac website to help legitimize it.

I know it's more nuanced than this, but generally (in the US, at least) holders of a trademark need to defend the mark at the peril of "abandonment" or the mark becoming "generic". I expected to see something about this in the post.

I commonly hear people saying that, but then other people claiming this isn't true.

Is there a clear source for this mechanism?

You can find examples in each direction but, considering the potential damage of not defending a trademark, it's usually worth being quite proactive about that defense.

There isn't a clear source (at least that I'm aware of) since this is handled by the legal system with a lot of nuance on a case by case basis. It is very reasonable to be proactive in trademark defense but if you aren't courts may still side with you if the establishment of usage was clear.

A pretty recent example would be Twitter https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2026/01/06/operati...

It was a big enough deal that Nintendo put out advertisements in 1990 [0], asking people to not use "a Nintendo" to refer generically to other video game systems, specifically out of fear of genericization.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/5m9grz/theres_no_...

Don't Say Velcro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY

15 U.S.C. § 1127

People say it's not true because people confuse copyright and trademark. It isn't true for copyright at all, but it is true for trademark.

Incidentally, this is why Richard Stallman objects to the term intellectual property. It bundles together three very different areas of property rights (copyright, trademark, and patents) and treats them as sort of a single entity, even though they're really very different, both in their reason for existing and in their mechanisms.

> People say it's not true because people confuse copyright and trademark. It isn't true for copyright at all, but it is true for trademark.

People believe so many dumb things about copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. For example: You don't legally need to use the various symbols for trademarks and copyrights you don't own. Unless there's a contract in force saying you have to, there's no Symbol Police gonna rappel from the skylights and break your keyboard if you say you used a Xerox without the nifty ™ symbol.

Another thing I've seen is the apparent notion that you can "renew" a copyright. Nope, not for a long time now: You get the full term up front with no special action, and once it's done it's gone, unless the law is actually changed in the meantime. Disney didn't "renew" the copyright on "Steamboat Willie" and the dumb live-action remakes aren't being done to "renew" anything, they're just some executive having a brain fart.

Well, if you are Disney, it turns out you can - by having the law changed just before the thing would go into the public domain.

If you've noticed, Disney has stopped doing that. New stuff is entering the Public Domain.

Like "Steamboat Willie", which I believe was mentioned here recently.

The problem is if it becomes a normal word in everyday use, then it can lose it's trademark. I suspect it will happen to google soon, I definitely have heard people say they googled something on bing. Wikipedia has this list of trademarks that were lost this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

This issue with Notepad++ isn't even really about trademark, even though that would be the legal means to enforce it. It's more about Criteria #4 of the opensource definition "Integrity of The Author’s Source Code" Which is there so you can't give the original project a bad name while forking it. https://opensource.org/osd

That’s correct. The best example is that of cellophane tape which was a brand but it lost protection. Xerox very aggressive in the day and wrote lawyer letters to anyone who used Xerox as a verb to protect their brand.

I’m not sure if Google has ever done similar but people use google as a verb to mean web search and I’m not sure if they worried about losing brand protection or though of it as an advantage in acquiring users.

I think this is hugely misunderstood, though. You have to defend your trademark, but it's still within your rights to grant someone permission to use it.

The Notepad++ guy wasn't an attack dog here. I'm 100% behind his reasonable position. Just saying, you're not legally obligated to say "no, no one else in the entire world can use it". It's more that you have to say "no one else can use it without my permission." Also just saying, if you want to use someone else's trademark, it's a really, really bad idea to start the conversation by using it without their permission and thereby requiring them to decide right then and there whether they'll allow you to. It's kind of like asking to borrow someone's car versus taking it first and then asking if that was OK.

> I think this is hugely misunderstood, though. You have to defend your trademark, but it's still within your rights to grant someone permission to use it.

I think it's a case of where a lot of people don't have experience with trademark licensing.

Back in the 90s I worked for a small company that was in various "partner" programs with hardware and software companies (Microsoft, Intel, Citrix, etc). Each "partnership" agreement came with trademark licensing documentation and very, very specific usage requirements for using the trademarked name, logos, etc. With at least one of the companies we had to get ad copy approved for compliance with our license.

And those kinds of licenses support your case where you have to defend your trademark. “See, your honor, how we diligently negotiated licensing terms with other parties, who compensated us for it? This is an active trademark used in business.”

The single biggest thing is that you have to stop people from using it without permission. If that means you stop them by granting that permission, then so be it.

But there would be no basis to claim this trademark was abandoned (even before Don Ho responded to infringement). Notepad++ is famous software actively getting new features and new releases. It is well-known among technically sophisticated Windows users in the US, and until this kerfuffle Don Ho's ownership of the name was never seriously contested in OSS circles. Nobody could reasonably claim this trademark is stale or generic.

It's nuanced. I'm not an attorney and I don't have the bandwidth right now to go looking for citations. The general read I'm getting is that zealously defending your rights to the mark are the safest way to make sure a court doesn't see you as abandoning your rights. I gather that different courts in the US have treated a lack of defense differently.

Notepad++ for Mac was renamed to Nextpad++ (“a small nod to Mac history”)

Personally I think NextPad would’ve been a perfectly acceptable (and subjectively better) name

NextPad++ signals that this is related to Notepad++, while also saying that it's not Notepad++.

NextPad would be a better name for a standalone editor.

NeXT + Notepad++ or NeXT + iPad + ObjC++ , nice , also Nextpad editor already exist , i found two.

If you don’t actively protect your trademark, you risk losing your trademark. Im surprised that isn’t part of his reasoning.

It's not about losing your trademark but about someone you don't know and can't yet trust, potentially using your trademark for their own goals. It'd be like letting someone use your name and social security number to identify themselves. You wouldn't want that even if it's a friend, let alone a stranger you never met in person.

Let's say the IRGC, Mossad or NSA is behind that developer of the Notepad++ on Mac clone and would love to piggyback on your trademark name in order to push a spyware infected app on to some targets. You don't know them and can't trust them so you don't want them using your name because that would backfire on you.

There's plenty of precedent with this in browser extensions, where once they become super popular they end up being sold and bought by some shady Israeli PE or ad-tech company with ties to Mossad. You don't want your name or trademark anywhere near this, if you value it, so you'll have to call out and ban everyone who tries to use it without your explicit permission.

This isn't the developer trying to be a dick to other developers, this is the developer exercising common sense and self preservation.

A PR from the MANPADS codebase is always a dead giveaway

Don Ho mixes politics with his work, thus Notepad++ has been targeted in the past by state-sponsored hackers to deliver malware. A vibe/agent coded fork (it was made just last March) is a huge security risk, the brand weakening is just the cherry on the cake.

Of course I'd prefer for Don Ho to voice his political opinions through more appropriate channels, but it is what it is.

Would it then be natural to mention the trademark defense issue?

It was unusual it wasn't mentioned, yes. I assumed it was so obvious he decided not to emphasize it, but fortunately this has now been resolved.

2 questions. First, how does a vibe coded / generated fork or derivation pose security risks to the original work? Second, what is a "more appropriate channel" to express his opinions than the platform he has as a maintainer of a massively popular project?

I would argue that we don't see enough open source developers presenting their political or social views in the context of their works.

The security risk is I Google for "notepad++ Mac", because I have a Mac, and get malware served up to me.

The appropriate channel for other people to voice their politics is anywhere else, so that ASalazarMX doesn't have interact with it and gets to pretend everything's okay.

Since you answered the first question, I'll answer the second according to my original intent.

The appropriate channel for voicing politics and ideology would be my personal accounts, not a software utility. Would you enjoy if your generous neighbor offered to mow your lawn for free, but left political messages on it?

I've rarely contributed to, or released something open source, but I know it's unprofessional to mix personal and work subjects, and open source is work, even if you do it for free.

And to counter the visibility argument, I followed Don Ho on Twitter, now on BlueSky, and actually enjoy his publications even when they aren't strictly work related.

There's a problem where generic skepticism of intellectual property law— which isn't bad in and of itself— all too frequently morphs into uninformed all-consuming opposition to any kind of IP enforcement whatsoever, without understanding the purpose it serves or why it might be necessary.

"The code is open to forking, but we need to enforce our trademarks because otherwise anyone can upload malware claiming to be Notepad++" is a real, legitimate concern and not some kind of ghastly imposition, but I think whoever sent that email didn't even bother thinking about that. They just saw somebody defending IP rights and went straight into attack mode, because that's what a lot of online communities have trained people to do reflexively.

Don Ho handled this like an absolute champ.

I think the cloner had good intent, but he didn't get approval, so absolutely not okay no matter what.

If “good intent” means making a copycat website and putting Don Ho’s name on the author bio page.

It's weird everyone is treating this anything other than what Don is saying - port's fine, don't make it sound like we endorsed this. Don't make us responsible for your product.

Good on you enforcing your trademark!

To hopefully save some here the risk of an embarrassing redaction mistake:

Redaction should be done by deleting the content from the media AND THEN adding decoration you want to indicate the material was removed.

If you do things any other way you're liable to end up with something like the attempt on the site where the email might as well have been highlighted instead.

Can also be useful information to have if you want to give the appearance of having diligently redacted without doing too much to protect some asshole. IMO if the author of that email wanted to protect their anonymity and employability they should have used a throwaway, Don is doing them an undeserved service by even half-assedly blocking it out.

I don't think that's the kind of person Don is. If he wanted to out them he wouldn't have tried to act like it was an accident.

I don't think so either, I'm saying he's a better person than I am for blocking it out as much as he did. If someone sends me a filthy email like that I don't particularly care if their name and contact info are made public or what happens afterwards.

I'm not here to pass judgement one way or the other on what one would/should do in regards to redactions but there are reasons beyond politeness to not share such private communications & information publicly without consent (especially in Europe where Don is).

OpenSource is about freedom have the code, not freedom to have a projects identity. Its disgusting to see people attacking an author of a successful project who's openly allowing forks just because someone decided to go beyond forking the code and tried to also steal the brand.

It's a case of someone putting out candy for halloween and someons running away with the bowl screeming! Well you put i out there!

I hope to see an appology from the author of the fork who's hopefully understanding that what they did is not ok.

Is leaving many many typos in your posts a way of proving it was written by a human?

I guess so.

I support the author’s stance, but the extra decoding required to read the post was not expected.

A bit dramatic. It’s a 15 second read

You have to actively protect your trademark

Could they call it Notepad+²?

After all, Notepad++ is about as different from Notepad as Notepad+² is from Nodepad++.

I'd call it Notepad#

I have over four years of experience programming in Notepad pound.

ObjectiveNotepad Plus Pro Max

Or subscribe to ObjectiveNotepad Plus Pro Max+ for $2.99/mo.

imagine complaining about trademark issues when notepad++ is two plusses added to the name of a microsoft product

That kind of hate is why we struggle to keep good open source maintainers. Let’s try to be kind to people who gift their time and talent to the world, please.

I'm assuming in good faith you're talking about the hatemail Don receiveid.

I agree. As an open source software enjoyer, I know that unless specified otherwise (and arguably even then), there are exactly _zero_ contractual and/or legal obligations on the part of the maintainer. I'm happy to benefit from battle-tested code, and I'm even happier when I can contribute back to it, for the benefit of all. This is the spirit of open source. Being purposefully obtuse to open source maintainers of such important piece of software is bad for everyone involved.

Also, he's taken a political stance in the past, which turns him into a magnet for certain discussions.

Oh, I hadn't even considered my comment could be taken the other way. I'm absolutely referring to the nasty email this guy received.

OK but just use Zed anyway

On Windows Notepad++ uses native controls and (IMHO) that alone makes it much more pleasant to use than Zed.

I don't have a dog in this race, but I'm having a hard time seeing both sides. The code is GPL, it can be forked. Does the GPL specify that the user has to change the name when it's forked? Or is that some extra clause that this particular developer added to the license? Does the GPL say anything at all about trademarks? The name of the forked project seems to be kind of a weird hill to want to die on.

Linux is GPL'ed and the name Linux is also trademarked. But if I decided to port it to run on a lava lamp, what would be wrong with my calling the project "Linux for Lava Lamp"?

A fork's existence does not obligate the mainline maintainer to maintain the fork, no matter what the name of the fork is. As long as the forked project makes the relationship (or lack of relationship) and support expectations clear, I'm not sure what this battle was about.

> Does the GPL specify that the user has to change the name when it's forked?

No, in the same way the GPL does not specify the user must use their own computer to develop the fork rather than taking the upstream maintainer's laptop home without asking.

The GPL grants no rights whatsoever to use the name, just the code.

But the GPL grants rights to use the code, which itself contains the name. Is there language in the license that exempts "the source code that contains the project name" from my ability to copy and redistribute it?

You're asking the wrong questions because you're mixing up copyright and trademark law.

The GPL covers copyright. It includes the source code, which as you noted contains the project name. This is why you may click "fork" on GitHub and wind up with a fork that is "yours" under the original name.

Trademark law is usage based. If you then set up a website for your fork under the original name, that's illegal. The fact that you're allowed to have a fork containing that name isn't relevant. Copyright allows the code, but you're now violating trademark law.

If you copy and redistribute the code as-is, on a website called, let's say opensourcesoftware.com, nobody can stop you.

If you copy and redistribute the code on a website called thisistheofficalsitefornotepadplusplus.com, because the ownership of the name Notepad++ is separate from the code.

If you copy and change the code before redistributing it, they can say you're not allowed to use the name Notepad++ and must change that part of the code. You asked a very pertinent question with "Does the GPL say anything at all about trademarks?" It does not, because it has nothing to do with copyright. It does say if you modify the source code, you must make available the your modifications under the same license.

If it helps, here's another way to think about it:

If you're a photographer, and someone signs a photo release form for you, that means you're allowed to use their photo in marketing materials.

It doesn't mean you're allowed to use their photo to get a passport in their name.

The photo release form doesn't need to have additional language saying "the photographer agrees not to use the photo to create a fraudulent passport" for this to be disallowed.

You're having a hard time seeing the side where one side has a trademark on the project name and logo, and the other side is using those without permission?

It’s the intersection of copyright and trademark law, where lots of folks get tripped up. The fork had a website that used the trademark owner’s trademark without permission. It has nothing to do with copyright or code.

You said: "and support expectations clear,"

Therein lies the rub. By not honouring the trademark, the fork made the association of service, support, otherwise to Notepad++ making it seem like it was officially supported.

Imagine if someone who used the fork attempt to get support on a product that wasn't supported and, when faced with limited responsiveness, etc. decided to denigrate the original developer by lambasting them on HackerNews, et al. The reputational damage alone would be seen as a reason to defend the mark.

I work with a very large OSS nonprofit who has trademarks in most of the geos around the world and vigourously defends them for precisely this reason: reputational damage undercuts the community, the developers, and the reason for existence.

The code is GPL, not the name.

How many forks do you know which have the same name as the original.

Imagine the confusion if Firefox is compatible with some feature but Firefox and Firefox aren’t.

Imagine who gets angry emails if the MacOS port does any damage and people google for the author of Notepad++

Just look what the author of curl get because people found curl somewhere and googled his name or found it in the source

https://daniel.haxx.se/email/toc.html

"Does the GPL specify that the user has to change the name when it's forked? "

- GPL is defines copyright permissions for the software code: copying, modifying, and redistributing.

- Trademark protection controls use of a name, logo, slogan, or branding.

“Notepad++” is a protected trademark, so a fork is allowed to use the GPL-covered source code any way it wants, but it can not use the trademark Notepad++ in a way that suggests it is the original project or is endorsed by it.

It would be like someone forking GnuCash from GPL code and calling then it "Quicken for Linux." The source code can be forked, but the Intuit trademark prevents someone from using the name Quicken because it could confuse users.

Your comment makes the copyright/trademark split very clear, thanks! But doesn't the existence and enforcement of the trademark put conditions on the code fork that are incompatible with the GPL? If I'm GPLing my code, the license says you can copy it and redistribute it, including all the strings and graphical assets covered under the license. It doesn't generally carve out stuff that's trademarked as not covered by the license. I can go to the Linux tree right now, fork a copy ("Linux" strings and all), and distribute it on my web site, and be legally in the clear. Same is true for any other GPL project out there.

"Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds".

So you can fork all you want, but he can legally prevent you from calling it "Linux".

So, Linus himself can force someone to take down their mirrored kernel tarball? Wild. I suppose I learned something today.

Their modified kernel tarball, yes. The idea is if you create a forked version that instead is malware, that intercepts everything that happens on the computer and sends it off to an adversary, that trademark protections allow the original author of the non-malicious software to say you can't call it by the name that I'm using for my product because you've changed it and it's malicious now.

Trademark law is the most reasonable leg of the intellectual property triad, in my opinion.

No, don't think so. But he can force you to call it "Carrot" in all marketing materials. Although you have to state it's a modification of "Linux" because of the GPL :)

In this case, the issues under dispute are the cases where the trademark was used outside of the GPL-covered code.

Specifically the port author using the Notepad++ name and logo on their website, in addition to the photo and bio of the original Notepad++ author, in a way that could mislead others to think that this was part of the original Notepad++ project.

A post with screenshots is here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/npp-trademark-infringemen...

Hosting a copy of the GPL'd Linux code, represented as such, and making a website claiming to represent Linux or the Linux Foundation with Linus's face and name on it are different things.

> As long as the forked project makes the relationship (or lack of relationship) and support expectations clear, I'm not sure what this battle was about.

This is what it’s about: the forked project was NOT clear about the relationship to the original.

> Linux is GPL'ed and the name Linux is also trademarked. But if I decided to port it to run on a lava lamp, what would be wrong with my calling the project "Linux for Lava Lamp"?

You can do this not because Linux is GPL, but because Linus Torvalds has authorized certain uses of this trademark in some form; I could not find specific information for Linux, but the Linux Foundation provides reference: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/brand-guidelines

Arch linux mentions this in their website I think that distros that user the linux name asked for permission to use it

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