At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.

I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.

I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.

My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)

The engineering of making things waterproof is in the realm of "A bit more annoying but easily doable if anyone's interested in doing it", not "Doable at the cost of everything else".

It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.

Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...

Not sure what the context or background of that is, but here in India, the G3 sold out shortly after launch.

Per this [1] stat by a Motorola exec too, it did very well.

> Motorola’s General Manager for India, Amit Boni stated at the Moto X Play launch event that the Moto G (3rd Gen) that was launched in July is among the fastest selling smartphones on Flipkart. Its sales mark grossed 140% higher than the Moto G (1st Gen and 2nd Gen).

(And I know that's legitimate because a lot of peers, friends and family, folks on the streets etc had Motorolas.)

> and the company producing it ran out of business.

Unfortunate, yes, but I don't think it was because they made and sold phones that didn't sell. I don't know if it was business mismanagement or what, but it's an unfortunate legacy of one of the most promising brands. Fortunately Lenovo isn't killing the brand, so there's that.

1 - https://telecomtalk.info/motorola-sold-over-5-6-million-indi...

Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.

> not giving a fuck about any other criteria

That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.

> profit

I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!

maybe just a little less margin for apple...

It's because of those "bureaucrats", that car manufacturers were forced to implement catalytic converters and ECUs for emissions controls, and why the air in your city isn't a smog cloud like in the 70s.

I hate it when people assume the environmental and societal problems caused the unregulated free market, are gonna be fixed by the same unregulated free market which only optimizes for profit.

I generally agree with that sentiment, except we don't have a vibrant market of many options with many different trade offs. Finding headphone jack, solid reparability, user swappable battery, easily replaceable USB port, and all the other things that one might want is basically impossible. The vast majority of phones are highly unrepairable, have no headphone jack, have everything soldered to a tiny number of internal boards, and are full of anti repair dark patterns.

If the author of "Notepad++ for Mac" doesn't happen to be French as well, is there anything (legally) preventing them from using this trademark?

Also it's really not a finder's-keeper's thing with trademarks and international borders. If someone trademarked Notepad++ in the US and released some janky port with the Notepad++ name, Don Ho could likely still win in US court. Most reasonably knowledgeable US consumers who are plausibly in the market for a Windows text editor are at least superficially familiar with "Notepad++" as the name of a well-regarded software product. I know we travel in certain circles, but there is a reason this guy wants to use "Notepad++" and not "MacnotePlus - A fork of Notepad++ for MacOS." It's a famous name.

In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.

Registering a trademark can be useful, but it is also optional. At very least, registration helps make the ownership of the mark easier to discover and this can help everyone start on the right foot.

(* I'm not familiar at all with the laws of France, but that's fine: The alleged violation happened in New York.)

Isn't that only if it's something that would actually qualify for a trademark?

For example, "Car Shop" or probably even "Hamburgers USA" would not qualify for a trademark due to being overly generic/descriptive (in many jurisdictions).

Now in Notepad++'s case the inclusion of the ++ obviously means it would indeed qualify.

Just asking as I'm sure there's people around here with personal experience around the topic, though again it can differ quite a bit by country.

There's a lot of nuance in trademarks, including geographical nuance. It's possible for someone to open a small bakery in Boise, Idaho named Bread Stuff and not conflict at all with an existing local bakery named Bread Stuff that operates in Fresno, California.

Having different uses can count, too. Moe's Barber Shop can be a defensible trademark, but that doesn't necessarily conflict at all with Moe's Car Parts across town.

Except: There's also a concept of well-known trademarks, which supercede some of these things. There's a place called Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, in Vegas. There was a time person could build a pawn shop in Somewhere Else Entirely with that same name, and that'd be fine. But now that the Pawn Stars TV series has made the place very famous, it's something that would almost certainly be shown to be a well-known mark if someone were naive enough to try to use that name for their own new pawn shop, today. The Vegas shop would almost certainly win that court battle.

I'd like to think that notepad++ is also a well-known mark by this point.

---

Anyway my intent earlier was just to help promote the concept of registration being optional-but-useful, not to write a book about trademarks. :)

And IANAL. I just got wrapped up in a trademark issue myself nearly 20 years ago, wherein I had been doing nothing wrong by using a name that another small company had been already been using in a very different market segment. Our uses were for very different things.

They subsequently got much bigger and arguably came to be well-known, and they wanted me to stop using that name. I had a valid case: I wasn't infringing when I started.

But I no money and no lawyers, while they had enough money and lawyers that there was no way I'd survive in court.

Hell, there was no way I'd even be able to afford to appear in court; I'd have lost by default and probably been required to pay for the whole mess. I was broke as fuck back then (I still am, but I was then, too).

But what I did have was some time, so I used that time to stuff my brain full of information about how trademarks work -- to prove to myself whether I had a leg to stand on as much as anything else.

I should have just given up. A sane person would have just washed their hands of it all and moved on. But I really liked the name I was using, and I am not always very sane.

It worked out OK, I guess: At the end of that very stressful time, I wound up giving them exactly what they wanted, and they ended up giving me some money in exchange. No courtroom was involved.

And now we're square. (And to be clear: I don't blame them at all for any of this. They're a good company. But even good companies are required to actively defend their trademark. Trademarks are not like patents: You need to use it, and actively defend it, or it is lost.)

These are plain-looking, but none of them are descriptive. Target isn't a target, it's a discount store. If they'd be called "Discount Store" then I believe they'd have trouble getting a trademark. If they'd be called "Retailer" or "Store" or if you'd make a Stripe competitor called "Payment Processor" I don't think you'd stand a chance.

But really the intention of my comment was hoping that someone on HN could answer this:

> Is using a mark in trade enough only if it qualifies as a trademark in the first place?

If does not qualify, then it is unqualified.

(Is this a riddle?)

Copyright protects the right of authors to decide how their work is used -- it applies to the content, e.g. the code.

Trademark protects the right of consumers to not be misled by fakes or frauds -- it applies to the names and identifiers that people apply to products and services, e.g the brand name.

Open source copyright licenses allow you to use the source code, but they typically do not grant any trademark rights.

It is Mozilla public license, not GPL, but the story is the same.

Or look at CentOS (before it was acquired by RedHat)

The rationale being you are more likely to remember grammatical cogent sentence, than a random string of alphanumeric characters. Although I will agree that the generated sentences don't seem easy to remember. So I doubt it's utility.

The other week I had a fun project to implement IPv6 support in TempleOS. I did stop to think whether I should, and determined that absolutely not.

I asked Claude to start planning on doing it. It started referencing ZealOS, which is a fork of TempleOS and already has a functioning TCP stack.

That's when I determined that it would no longer even be fun, because someone else had already done all the heavy lifting, and gave up.