Re: Enforcing coreboot as lowercase

On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 10:46 AM Arthur Heymans <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> Are you proposing to give up trying to defend the spelling of the
>> project's name because too many people write it wrong and educating
>> them is too much effort? If so, I think this is a self-defeating
>> attitude and I completely disagree with it.
>
>
> Language is not a set in stone thing. There are default grammatical rules
> on how to write things and sometimes it is worth it to override the rules
> as I explained.
> It's basically a trade-off.
> There is no right and wrong here, except maybe from a trademark
> perspective, which most people are unaware of.
> Later I make the case that even from a trademark perspective I don't think
> it matters.
> I'm making the case that enforcing to write "coreboot" lowercase has more
> downsides than upsides, which is why I propose to allow "Coreboot" at the
> start of a sentence.
> Personally I think educating people about a trademark thing is superfluous
> work.
> Also in my personal communication it's a conundrum.
> For instance if I write a blog post I don't want to look like I'm making
> silly grammatical mistakes to those that haven't looked into the trademark
> registry (which almost no one does).
> At the same time I don't want to explain the trademark either as I think
> it blunts communicative efficiency.
>
> Or is it that the trademark only covers the all-lowercase "coreboot"
>> spelling, so one can use a name like "CoReboot" (e.g. for something
>> unrelated) without infringing the "coreboot" trademark? In that case,
>> making the trademark case-insensitive makes sense.
>>
>
> So currently the only reason lowercase coreboot is enforced is because
> that's how the trademark was obtained.
> I'm using the argument that trademark interpretation is typically broad
> and allows for using an uppercase letter at the start of a sentence since
> that's what grammatical rules want.
> So I think "Coreboot" is very much covered by the "coreboot" trademark.
>

This matches my understanding that trademarks cover variations of font,
size, color, and combinations of upper/lowercase lettering. No need to be
overly pedantic about writing "coreboot" versus "Coreboot" etc. so long as
the project is not misrepresented. If a company tries to sell a product
called "CoReBoOt" or something then we'll C&D them.

We should probably use `coreboot` in areas internal to coreboot, such as
our documentation, but I wouldn't ding people for using `Coreboot` in
casual contexts such as forums, commit messages, etc.

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