Oddbean

I agree. I will accept the ™ since anyone can do it and good luck defending it, but yeah, the ® is like, they paid good money to the gooberments, signaling that they want to control those words in the English language... And don't fall for the prior art and special words arguments. The truth is that they want the language ubiquity of Clorox/Bleach AND the rights to squash/profit from anyone who tries to use the words...

I understand the motivation. Take the word "permaculture". Apparently, the word is trademarked because they were trying to start and defend a movement/culture of design principles... They needed a way to repel the me-toos and copycats that didn't share the same core ideals. Defense against hijackers is the main motivation... In todays AI/bot/scam environment, that risk is even higher.

I think it's about trademarks. Take freebsd for example. They put tons of effort in the project for decades. So of course they want to protect themselfes from copycats luring newbies into installing potential malware by using their name, logo and so on. I don't like the idea of copyright, but I can understand the motivation behind this. Openbsd on the other hand doesn't seem to care, no (tm) there iirc

on the malware it doesn't. But a TM does protect merch that is sold using the brand trademark, that can be used to raise funds that back to supporting the project. That's where the business value comes in and also bootstrapping to keep it going where it otherwise would have to depend on grants/donations

But why should the owners of the trademark tell you what you can print on your shirt? Trademark, patents, copyright etc all violate the property in real scarce assets, just in order to create scarcity for a non-scarce information. It's such a destructive idea.

Maybe it's just to make sure that forks are labeled correctly/use a different name? Hmm I never really thought of it. But in the case of FreeBSD, Apple would not be allowed to call their fork FreeBSD, they had to label it different. Like AppleBSD or macOS. Seriously IDK

I am 100% with you on IP. But they are free to see otherwise, they are free to try to monetize their efforts in any way they seem legitb it's their work. The sole problem with IP is, that it is protected without consent. If you made a personal contract about it, I would be fine with it - like a NDA when you buy a book and you pay a lot if you leak it. On the other hand, when you publish something, it becomes public. BUT we cannot deny corporatist realities, just becsuse they are not in way with our ancap thinking.

After a night of thought - a legit point could also be to pay the minimal TM fee to keep away hustle when OTHERS register the name and try to sue YOU for using your name for your project... Even if you win in court, it's a lot of hustle compared to pay some 100 bucks for a 'TM'.