[EddieRingle]

> We will not rely on unusual licences to restrict competitors from running Dagger as a service.

Your "Trademark Guidelines" appear to contradict you:

> Third-party products may not use the Marks to suggest compatibility or interoperability with our platform. For example, the claims “xxx is compatible with Dagger”, “xxx can run your Dagger configurations”, are not allowed.

> but you have to build your own brand, and you can't confuse and fragment the Dagger developer community itself

If I do an incognito Google search for "dagger", the first result is the Wikipedia page for the knife, and the second result is for Dagger, the dependency injection tool. By naming this "Dagger" you're confusing not just your own developer community but the pre-existing one as well.

[shykes]

> > We will not rely on unusual licences to restrict competitors from running Dagger as a service.

> Your "Trademark Guidelines" appear to contradict you:

They do not. Software licenses and trademark guidelines are two different things. Some commercial open-source vendors have changed their licenses to restrict use of the software in various ways - typically to limit competition from large cloud providers. We don't do that, and have no intention to. Our license is OSI-approved and we intend to keep it that way. That is what I am referring to.

> but you have to build your own brand, and you can't confuse and fragment the Dagger developer community itself

This is the intent behind the language in the trademark guideline which you quoted: you can redistribute and modify our code. But if you distribute a modified copy, call it something else.

> > Third-party products may not use the Marks to suggest compatibility or interoperability with our platform. For example, the claims “xxx is compatible with Dagger”, “xxx can run your Dagger configurations”, are not allowed.

> By naming this "Dagger" you're confusing not just your own developer community but the pre-existing one as well.

I disagree. Dagger has existed in private beta for over a year, thousands of engineers have been given access, and I can't remember a single instance of any of them being confused by the name. We have registered the trademark, and nobody has raised an issue.

[EddieRingle]

> > > We will not rely on unusual licences to restrict competitors from running Dagger as a service.

> > Your "Trademark Guidelines" appear to contradict you:

> They do not. Software licenses and trademark guidelines are two different things. Some commercial open-source vendors have changed their licenses to restrict use of the software in various ways - typically to limit competition from large cloud providers. We don't do that, and have no intention to. Our license is OSI-approved and we intend to keep it that way. That is what I am referring to.

I'm glad the product is open source, but that provision isn't in the context of source code, it is a top-level item listed on that page. That's why I interpreted "unusual licences" to generally mean a sort of "legal acrobatics".

When you're threatening people with legal action you need to be clear, and right now the text on that page is not, according to what you're saying here. I doubt many people are going to be searching Hacker News comments for the true intent behind these guidelines.

> I disagree. Dagger has existed in private beta for over a year, thousands of engineers have been given access, and I can't remember a single instance of any of them being confused by the name. We have registered the trademark, and nobody has raised an issue.

I don't think that really addresses the point. Dagger (as started under Square) is nearly ten years old, and Google's 2.0 fork is from 2016. It's used by thousands of published Maven artifacts, countless applications, and tens of thousands of developers (at least). This is the first time I've heard of your project, but that's bound to happen in tech. Whether you registered it or not without complaint doesn't much matter either, the issue is being raised here, now that you've publicly launched.

[shykes]

> When you're threatening people with legal action you need to be clear, and right now the text on that page is not, according to what you're saying here.

That's good feedback, thank you. We can try and make it clearer as long as it remains legally correct and enforceable. Do you have specific feedback on which parts you found unclear, and why?

[ec109685]

How is possible to restrict someone from making a factual statement like X is compatible with Y?

[klohto]

If Y is a trademarked term, you are free to not allow statements about your brand.

[ec109685]

"It is perfectly acceptable and within the bounds of the law to use another's trademark in advertising, provided certain standards are met. The advertisement must be truthful and the use of another's trademark must not give a false impression of connection, approval or sponsorship by the owner of the other mark."

https://www.gfrlaw.com/what-we-do/insights/beyond-brand-x-us...

So as long as they don't imply endorsement, "I'm compatible with X seems fine".