Matthias Felleisen scripsit: > > As Hal Abelson once said: 'MIT made a mistake by not trade-marking > > the name'. > > Jinx, is it really too late to do so? I would welcome this. -- Matthias
Too late, and definitely a baaaaad idea. Trademarks, at least in the U.S., are labels "used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to identify that the products and/or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source of origin, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities." You lose trademarks if you don't police them: that is, you have to make an effort to find violators and have you lawyers send them cease-and-desist letters. And even then, if the public starts to use the word to describe the product or service in general, as opposed to a particular source of it, the trademark owner loses his rights. Trademarks have been lost (like "aspirin" and "zipper" in the U.S.) for failure to do this. Scheme doesn't have a unique source of origin, very much not. And I don't think there's any reasonable doubt that the name "Scheme" refers generically to the language itself (which isn't even a product or service) and to interpreters, compilers, etc. (which are products), and not to any specific source. As far as I know, there have been only three cases of attempts to trademark names of programming languages: "PL/I", "TRAC", and "Ada". The first was IBM attempting to lock down its cool name; the second was a somewhat paranoid inventor trying to lock down his cool language; the third was the U.S. Department of Defense. In the particular case of TRAC, it became impossible for other people to implement it under that name, condemning the language to an early grave (it's used in FreeMACS under the name MINT = Mint Is Not Trac). All three trademarks were eventually abandoned. Plug: My TRAC interpreter, appropriately written in Perl, is posted at http://www.catb.org/~esr/retro/trac.shar.gz . -- John Cowan [email protected] http://ccil.org/~cowan If a soldier is asked why he kills people who have done him no harm, or a terrorist why he kills innocent people with his bombs, they can always reply that war has been declared, and there are no innocent people in an enemy country in wartime. The answer is psychotic, but it is the answer that humanity has given to every act of aggression in history. --Northrop Frye _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
