On 2009-09-10, at 17:31, John Cowan wrote:
Trademarks relate to products; Scheme is not a product. Three times
(that I know of) people have tried to assert control of languages by
trademarking their names: PL/I, Ada, Trac. In all cases the efforts
have failed and the trademarks were abandoned: one fork of Trac wound
up being called Mint (Mint Is Not Trac).
Forty years ago, I was an enthusiastic UMIST (University of Michigan
Interactive String Translator) user, so I well recall the Trac debacle.
I never really understood the PL/I situation, the claim was IBM had
trademarked PL/$i$, for $1 <= i <= n$, for some n. That was definitely
abandoned early on. As for Ada, it may still be trademarked. I just
don't care enough about Ada to find out :)
I will throw out an alternative, perhaps a trademark could exist for
having passed a (hypothetical) test suite, as in `Certified R7RS
Scheme Goodness'. A hypothetical trademark for a hypothetical test
suite is too hypothetical for me, though.
As for what `Scheme' is, perhaps we could put adjectives before
`Scheme' in Thing1 and Thing2,
That's almost instinctive, but I'm trying to resist it, because for
thirty years "X Scheme" has meant "the X implementation of Scheme".
OK, then this kills `Toaster Scheme', `Teaching Scheme', and `Ultra-
Scheme' as names for Thing$_i$. This actually is worth thinking about,
unlike the trademark issue. How ARE we going to name these suckers?
-- v
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