Terminology Beyond the NixOS Trademark

point.free

3 points·cafkafk··2 comments

Hey, author here, not sure how popular this article is gonna be with HN, but want it to get out there.

This mostly just establishes some words that I'm using when discussing NixOS and the wider ecosystem.

Formalizing them hopefully will make it easier for others to reason and argue about functional system distributions without getting confused and talking past each other.

And with the new trademark, having ways to say "a thing like nix" that don't get you in trouble with the trademark seemed useful.

I hope this also make people think about how they can make things like Nix(OS), not just fork them, and that this is a general paradigm and not just something NixOS and GuixSD gets to do.

I think the average person thinks "who cares" when it comes to trademarks so I guess that is the question to ask. Somebody clearly cares about asserting ownership over the term. And it's not clear what the motivation of that 'somebody' is.

Why does an open source project need a trademark if not to assert ownership over it? Who at this moment in time is the intended target? who has been using the term NixOS that needs to be silenced?

And I guess this now means there is a viable legal basis to antagonize people who sell tshirts with the logo and words. Why that's necessary for an open source project makes no sense.

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