Hey Arthur, I don't know that enforcing lowercase coreboot in the codebase really has anything to do with the trademark. It was decided a long time ago, before I joined the project, that coreboot was going to be lowercase all the time. We can of course change this decision if desired, but if we're sticking with that decision, it makes sense to try to enforce it in the places that matter most, the codebase, commit messages, and documentation.
If it's really such a burden to spell it in lowercase in commit messages that we need to get rid of the check, then let's just change the decision about always using lowercase spelling. Martin Jul 4, 2024 at 09:47 by art...@aheymans.xyz: > 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 > _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email to coreboot-le...@coreboot.org
