Hi, not sure if it matters, but as a data point: I'm a coreboot user since about 8 years, I didn't know about the trademark being all-lowercase, and "Coreboot" at the start of a sentence definitively seems more harmonious to me.
> Coreboot is a reasonably well known as a project, but little people know > about the specificity of the trademark. This often causes confusion on > people either reading "coreboot" at the start of a sense, where it looks > grammatically wrong, making it even look unprofessional in the eyes of > some. This is because there is no other uppercase letter inside coreboot > that would make it a typical exception to regular grammar rules. Another reason is perhaps that "coreboot" is just very easy to pronounce and "seems like a proper word" instead of e.g. "itunes", if it were all-lowercase. > So my question is: can we relax the trademark in lowercase enforcement? I > would suggest to simply allow both ways. Is this enforcement only for commits? IMO inconsistent commit messages (re: capitalizing "coreboot") are not a huge deal and the point that it creates unnecessary additional work to educate people about it seems valid. But what if people contribute to documentatiion? IMO it would be nice to have it consistent there, i.e. no mix of "coreboot" and "Coreboot", which likely seems unprofessional to more people than beginning a sentence with "coreboot" does. Merlin On Thu, 4 Jul 2024 17:47:14 +0200, Arthur Heymans wrote: > Hi > > The coreboot trademark is registered as lowercase. > We enforce this in for instance commits, even when normal grammar would > dictate uppercase at the start of a sentence. > > This makes sense for very well known brands, companies and products like > "eBay", "iPhone", "AMD". They are all very well known trademarks and they > have some uppercase letter in them in atypical places. For these words > grammar exceptions seems reasonable. > > Coreboot is a reasonably well known as a project, but little people know > about the specificity of the trademark. This often causes confusion on > people either reading "coreboot" at the start of a sense, where it looks > grammatically wrong, making it even look unprofessional in the eyes of > some. This is because there is no other uppercase letter inside coreboot > that would make it a typical exception to regular grammar rules. > > People getting into the project making the mistake at the start of a > sentence, might get the wrong impression of too many idiosyncrasies. On top > of that it takes a non zero amount of effort on people in the project to > educate others on this trademark thing. > > Also trademark are typically a bit more broad than exactly how they are > registered. I cannot start a company called iNTel or aMD that makes chips. > I cannot put a product on the market called "IPHoNE". I think the same > applies to "coreboot". > > So my question is: can we relax the trademark in lowercase enforcement? I > would suggest to simply allow both ways. > > Arthur Heymans -- Merlin Büge _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email to coreboot-le...@coreboot.org
