[asien]

Remind me of that one time when they went berserk on every tooling vendor using the name « Mongo » in their product name :

RoboMongo,MongoGUI etc... they all received a legal notice to remove the name mongo from their product.

This was probably one of the most evil thing have seen in the open source industry .

Most of those vendors were open source with paid premium features or donation.

After receiving their legal notice most of those vendors deprecated or sold their project to a company feeling betrayed by Mongo.

As a result Mongo Compass became the de facto GUI for MongoDB and is advertise as sold with MongoDB Enterprise.

[msla]

I have absolutely no problem with trademarks as long as they're used as consumer protection.

For example, there's the whole uBlock vs uBlock Origin thing, where uBlock Origin is the good one run by the original maintainer, and uBlock is run by people who had nothing to do with the original project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

Trademarks can be used offensively, and few cases were more offensive than the Linux trademark dispute back in the 1990s, when William R. Della Croce, Jr., someone with nothing to do with the Linux kernel or anything else of value, acquired the trademark to "Linux" in September 1995 and began to demand royalties from the people who did useful things with their time. It took a court case to dislodge him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2559

What Mongo did was meaningfully better than what Della Croce did, and closer to the spirit of "prevent people from confusing products and thinking stuff is from the original development team when it isn't", but I can see how it would be an unpleasant shock in the Open Source world which, sadly, usually doesn't know or do a damned thing about trademarks until some asshole forces the issue.

[bodas]

It often seems like trademark lawyers must be fairly dim, as a lot of things confuse them that don't confuse anybody else.

[matt4077]

That's a rather unnecessary ad hominem.

What you should consider in your rage against trademarks is that they protect something far weaker than copyrights and patents. Trademarks are fundamentally exchangeable identifiers. They do not hold any value beyond what they are infused with due to their attachment to some company (person/organisation/...). Unlike patents, which cordon off the part of scientific reality from most, or copyright, which fundamentally relies on deadweight losses to make its mechanism work, trademarks are almost exclusively positive: there is nothing you gain from calling your product "Mongo-X" apart from the meaning the term carries based on the company creating the product.

(This slightly glosses over some practicalities, such as some terms having meaning before being adopted as a trademark, or the possible depletion of combinations of letters that can be pronounced. But those are just superficial practicalities, and they are acknowledged in various limits to trademarks).

[segmondy]

MongoDB is a profit company riding hard on the opensource bandwagon. This company is a publicly traded company, make no mistake about it. Profit over community. Every 3 months, they gotta report to Wall Street.

[rhacker]

I had no idea that's why it was renamed to Robo3T so confusing. Man what a way to bruise people trying to help.

[village-idiot]

Pretty much everything MongoDB has done as a company has come at the cost of its goodwill. I rarely meet devs who like or advocate for it. I meet plenty who advocated for it, but few who advocate for it.

I fully expect them to flame out in the next couple of years.

[coredog64]

Maybe Mel Brooks and/or the estate of Richard Pryor would like to capture some of that "Mongo" money.