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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

    > Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
    > Individual engineers, not company endorsements.

Bold haha. Maybe that's fine with the disclaimer, but feels like lawyer-bait.

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I've seen a lot of companies list logos if just a single engineer or team is using the product.

I go from company to company just to be able to add their logo to stuff I use :)

Fair haha. I'm no trademark lawyer, but I have to assume there's some wiggle room when you're not actively stealing their trademark and just referencing it... but still, the combined value of endorsements from Google/Nvidia/Amazon/ByteDance/Tencent/Alibaba/SalesForce/IBM etc has to be worth... a lot. That "not company endorsements" is rather load-bearing. I don't think I've seen anyone just say that, so maybe they're being a bit less bold haha.

You might as well say Herdr runs on 3 billion devices, go all in! 16 billion devices! Every human on earth installed Herdr twice! (source: study amongst users of herdr, n=5)

I get your point completely. I was (naively, I suppose) pretty surprised when I realized how low most people's threshold is to add a logo and claim a client/brand.

I've seen VCs very much encourage this (and shadier) behavior. There's a line between hustling / being an entrepreneur and actively trying to mislead people... clearly we don't all see that line being in the same place (:

edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to make such a broad statement about VCs. I'm sure plenty of people do this on their own

I used to work at BigTech in a role where I spent a lot of time reviewing new open source projects. It was always a fun game to guess which single person in which department tried out a piece of software that caused our logo to end up on the "as used by..." description on the tiniest of projects.

Feels like standard last ten years. All SaaS companies saying Used by people in Google just because one guy in support used it one time 5 years ago.

how do OSS projects even know unless that single engineer tells them or opens a github/etc issue or something like that?

Everyone does that. Some random startup "We're used by Google!". More often than not some random engineer signed up for a trial or some tiny department somewhere is using it for some internal thing

It’s such a tiny hop from there to “has a friend at Google who used it once as a favor”. I hadn’t even considered that people would do such a thing!

I didn't realize the prevalence until I worked at a company trying to get enterprise market share desperate to "add logos" (the customers were always referred to as "logos" if that tells you anything)

To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).

I think this is actually the norm.

I was under the impression that "individual engineers ..." is basically implied always, if not just outright lies, I don't trust these listings very highly. Except when its clear that the companies are actually customers. Like; how do I even add my company to this list? Email them?

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