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I couldn't agree more. It seems like terribly bad form. (That being said, well, I'm a very biased Perl/Catalyst developer.) But I'm not surprised by this, much. I am forever resigned to the fact that open source projects in general (and in particular, the more "polite" open source projects such as Perl culture overall) generally do a haphazard job when it comes to branding their projects, and obviously fall flat on their faces most of the time when it comes to policing a trademark, or what-have-you. It's not that the Perl/Catalyst people aren't <strong>smart</strong> enough to register Catalyst as a trademark; it's simply that doing so would be antithetical to the entire Perl culture. Plus, it costs, like, $400 or something to register a trademark, and what kind of open-source hippies have that kind of money just lying around anyway. So, we're probably going to have to get used to the fact that Adobe is going to run rampant over the Catalyst Framework, as they are of course the 800-pound gorilla of design software. Not that I don't like Adobe, of course, some of their software is pretty nice to use. (Especially if you are provided the software through your job, and you don't have to think about the price tag.) (And before you bark at me, uh, yes, I do in fact use both the GIMP and InkScape on my "real" computer. I just think some Adobe products are nice an polished and useful and optimized.) (Remember when Macromedia and Adobe sued and counter-sued each other over software patents? That was fun to watch. Also, when companies do that, uh, it's probably a good time to start thinking about who is going to buy whom.) Anyway, so, yeah. I think that's really mean of Adobe. I don't know if it's evil, necessarily. Just ignorant and boorish of them. It's sort of like them admitting, "Uh, yeah, we're supposed to be the big-league company you think of when you hear the word "CREATIVITY", but, uh, well we couldn't think of anything even halfway original so we decided to steal a brand name from the Perl community." (I actually have a couple friends who work for Adobe. Maybe I should ask them "Hey, guys, WTF is up with you stealing our WORD? I mean, it's OUR WORD. WE OWN IT." Except that would also then make me feel like an idiot. Still, I might do it anyhoo. I've always wanted to be a whiny open source "advocate".) |