Posts: 1370 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
Quote:takemehomegrandma wrote:
Quote:
ASiegel wrote:
Hijacking the established and widely known Bitcoin name with the obvious motive of profiteering off the name of an essentially unrelated project due to deliberately manufactured consumer confusion is morally bankrupt behaviour.
Trademarked names are the achilles heel of community-owned open source projects as you cannot effectively protect names without having them registered by a legal entitity and without the resources to engage in legal disputes as necessary. Exploiting this weakness is a cut-throat business move that is simply shady.
TL;DR follows:
It's called "forking" and is quite common and not really any more "highjacking" than releasing your own Linux distro and calling it "Linux [something]" with your own special touch and twist to it.
I am sorry but this is nonsense, and I know you are smarter than this.
First of all, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux and Fedora Linux, just to name three, all use the official
Linux-branded kernel. What their maintainers did not do is take a custom
incompatible kernel, which happens to also use various pieces of Linux kernel code, and then name their OS distribution, say, "Linux Gold" or something similar. Because that would be shady, exploitative, and misleading.
When Google forked Webkit, they renamed it to Blink, not "Webkit Gold". When Open Office was forked, it became "Libre Office" and not "Open Office Deluxe". When ownCloud was forked, it became "nextCloud" and not "ownCloud Private", and so on. All of these projects happen to share more code with the original implementation than Bitcoin Private does with regard to Bitcoin.
I get it. You are fully on board of the hype train. You even came here and opened a discussion thread about it so any criticism of the project might be perceived as a criticism of yourself. I do not expect you to agree that the name is problematic but there is also no need to suggest that stealing names of open source projects is somehow perfectly acceptable under any circumstances.
