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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if naming a product "SQLite Professional", when the company has no affiliation with the SQLite Consortium or HWACI (the company that originally developed SQLite and does sell commercial extensions), is a trademark violation. If I hadn't gone and checked the copyright notice at the bottom of the web page, I would have assumed that this was a product of HWACI.

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Here we leave the realm of copyright and enter trademark law. HWACI's operating instructions reference their trademark on SQLite. Given that the reasonably adept HN readership has members confused into believing this was an HWACI product it seems to fall squarely in the realm of trademark violation.

It is a violation of the SQLite trademark, I believe. I have sent a gentle email to the "sqlitepro.com" company pointing this out to them and suggesting some simply changes that will avoid the trademark violation. Hopefully they will take prompt action to clear up the confusion caused by their website and product and we can move on from this without further complications.

I received a gracious reply from the Hankinsoft developers. They have already added a disclaimer to the website and are promising to make the distinction between their product and SQLite even clearer over the next few days. Hopefully any confusion will be cleared up soon.

I'm sure they mimic SequelPro for SQLite.

Considering that SQLite is licensed public domain with the express permission of others selling modifications of it without restrictions (even without acknowledging the original authors), I'd be surprised they mind.

For the sake of the user base, I hope they do mind. It is confusing to have SQLite and SQLite Pro when they are not from the same people.

Not really, SQLite Pro is not a database, but a management tool. Pretty hard to confuse the two unless you're someone who's not likely to use either.

The naming I assume comes from Sequel Pro. It sounds a lot better than SQLite database management tool 2.0

Could you please explain the (multiple) downvotes? Anything factually incorrect? Any obviously wrong conclusions?

For those wondering, I quote the copyright release document:

> Because the SQLite software found at http://www.sqlite.org/ is in the public domain, anyone is free to download the SQLite software from that website, make changes to the software, use, distribute, or sell the modified software, under either the original name or under some new name, without any need to obtain permission, pay royalties, acknowledge the original source of the software, or in any other way compensate, identify, or notify the original authors.

http://www.sqlite.org/copyright-release.html

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