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Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know the rationale for this and especially how they will enforce their trademark. In particular, I've heard that open source projects named after their company find their trademark hard to enforce, and trademark enforcement sometimes causes a new name for the "community edition" of their products.

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Yep, trademark law is different from other types of IP - unless you can show you've continually defended a trademark, you can lose the rights to it. However it's not always handled the same way:

- Red Hat asked people to rename unofficial RHL distributions something like Pink Tie back in the day, and the tradition continued with CentOS and the like.

- Firefox has a different tack, and just makes sure people sign up to meet certain specs to be able to use the trademark. That might mean not diverting from upstream too much (eg, Debian wanted FF to use Linux FHS standard, FF upstream didn't do that, hence Iceweasel).

Not a lawyer etc.

Iceweasel is called like it is called because (roughly):

* The firefox branding itself is non-free, which is unacceptable for debian * The replaced the branding, but kept the name first * Mozilla complained and clarified that a program called "Firefox" has to bear the official logo

Detailed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

Which struck many as funny since the Debian trademark has similar restrictions on usage.

Ack re: Firefox branding. However the FHS stuff was also part of it - see post from a Mozillian here: http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=211

This is a little different though, as the company is named after the product now.. I don't know of any for-profit companies that have done this but the Blender Foundation has gotten on just fine.

Not a lawyer, but if the software project had an independent owner for its trademark, I believe that they'd have a case against 10gen. The name is deliberately chosen to provoke confusion between the two.

The MongoDB project was started by 10gen. I would be surprised if someone else owned the trademark.

So the new name is not so much deliberately chosen to provoke confusion as it is to reduce confusion.

Their previous full name was "10gen: the MongoDB Company"; they've been trying to dispel confusion over the company name vs. product for a long time (probably since they pivoted towards making Mongo the main business product - 10gen started as a PaaS company).

source: worked there

Edit: the title of this submission should really be "10gen: the MongoDB Company shortens their name to MongoDB, Inc." Less attention-grabby, more truthy.

Actually, Blackberry Ltd did this very recently (used to be called Research in Motion)

I think the reference was to companies supporting open source projects.

Makes sense, but does it confuse the for profit and non-profit?

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