[graypegg]

    > Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
    > Individual engineers, not company endorsements.

Bold haha. Maybe that's fine with the disclaimer, but feels like lawyer-bait.

[obmelvin]

I've seen a lot of companies list logos if just a single engineer or team is using the product.

[anticorporate]

I used to work at BigTech in a role where I spent a lot of time reviewing new open source projects. It was always a fun game to guess which single person in which department tried out a piece of software that caused our logo to end up on the "as used by..." description on the tiniest of projects.

[bdangubic]

I go from company to company just to be able to add their logo to stuff I use :)

[victorbjorklund]

Feels like standard last ten years. All SaaS companies saying Used by people in Google just because one guy in support used it one time 5 years ago.

[graypegg]

Fair haha. I'm no trademark lawyer, but I have to assume there's some wiggle room when you're not actively stealing their trademark and just referencing it... but still, the combined value of endorsements from Google/Nvidia/Amazon/ByteDance/Tencent/Alibaba/SalesForce/IBM etc has to be worth... a lot. That "not company endorsements" is rather load-bearing. I don't think I've seen anyone just say that, so maybe they're being a bit less bold haha.

You might as well say Herdr runs on 3 billion devices, go all in! 16 billion devices! Every human on earth installed Herdr twice! (source: study amongst users of herdr, n=5)

[obmelvin]

I get your point completely. I was (naively, I suppose) pretty surprised when I realized how low most people's threshold is to add a logo and claim a client/brand.

I've seen VCs very much encourage this (and shadier) behavior. There's a line between hustling / being an entrepreneur and actively trying to mislead people... clearly we don't all see that line being in the same place (:

edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to make such a broad statement about VCs. I'm sure plenty of people do this on their own

[johntash]

how do OSS projects even know unless that single engineer tells them or opens a github/etc issue or something like that?

[nijave]

Everyone does that. Some random startup "We're used by Google!". More often than not some random engineer signed up for a trial or some tiny department somewhere is using it for some internal thing

[pfannkuchen]

It’s such a tiny hop from there to “has a friend at Google who used it once as a favor”. I hadn’t even considered that people would do such a thing!

[nijave]

I didn't realize the prevalence until I worked at a company trying to get enterprise market share desperate to "add logos" (the customers were always referred to as "logos" if that tells you anything)

[zvr]

To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).

[camgunz]

I think this is actually the norm.

[logdahl]

I was under the impression that "individual engineers ..." is basically implied always, if not just outright lies, I don't trust these listings very highly. Except when its clear that the companies are actually customers. Like; how do I even add my company to this list? Email them?