[Retric]

Companies can be named after random nonsense, ‘pink catfish’ could easily be the world’s #1 supplier of firearms and nobody would find it strange.

Caterpillar, Apple, Kellogg, etc really don’t have anything to do with the underlying product but neither do people’s names.

[zkmon]

They didn't have "open" or "free" as prefix.

[saghm]

The nouns also aren't just generic terms for the type of products they're making. OpenApple wouldn't sound confusing in the same way for a laptop and phone manufacturer as it would for a company producing apples in a non-open way.

[lukan]

But apple still goes after real apple producers, who are older than apple.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/apple-swiss-trademark/

Something is wrong, when this is happening.

[yorwba]

You link is incorrectly paraphrasing this Wired article https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle... by claiming that Apple sued Swiss farmers, even though Apple sued the Institute of Intellectual Property instead. Apple won the case a month after publication of that article https://bvger.weblaw.ch/pdf/B-4493-2022_2023-07-26_c897bf22-... and the Swiss Fruit Union continues to use their apple logo (which looks completely different from any of the apple images Apple has trademarked) https://www.swissfruit.ch

[wbl]

Caterpillar does have a lot to do with the product. It crawls on a track and a photographer thought the track looked like a caterpillar .

[Retric]

Caterpillar sells way more than tracked vehicles, and very much uses CAT as its logo.

Nintendo could have named itself after playing cards, but that wouldn’t have kept up with its current business model.

[a012]

And they went out of their way to sue anyone that dare to use the cat word in the name or anything resembling an apple in the logo.