ddtaylor (u/ddtaylor)

ddtaylor commented on Prison isn’t set up for today’s tech so we have to do legal work the old way prisonjournalismproject.o... · Posted by u/danso

mayo369 · an hour ago

Wait a moment, they can't use computer? I remember read some news about prison people become a programmer or something like that...

ddtaylor · an hour ago

Federal versus state(s).

The Federal system is more-or-less standardized and many have access to many things either on campus or remotely.

The State system is a hodge-podge of nonsense and most States are ran like trash for money reasons.

ddtaylor commented on Volkswagen gates a new vehicle's full horsepower behind monthly subscription dexerto.com/entertainment... · Posted by u/taubek

kelipso · 6 days ago

I will absolutely be avoiding any car companies that do this lol. Completely slimy behavior. I was going to keep buying VW GTI or R models my entire life but this and the no manual transmission bs means I have to look at elsewhere. Probably gonna end up like those people who only drive ridiculously old cars.

ddtaylor · 6 days ago

> Probably gonna end up like those people who only drive ridiculously old cars.

Those old cars can be repaired whereas most of the non-old cars are simply small circuits of chips with strange DRM.

ddtaylor commented on Nvidia Tilus: A Tile-Level GPU Kernel Programming Language github.com/NVIDIA/tilus... · Posted by u/ashvardanian

ddtaylor · 7 days ago

Nvidia lock in attempt.

ddtaylor commented on OpenAI Progress progress.openai.com... · Posted by u/vinhnx

ddtaylor · 8 days ago

So we're at the corporate dick wagging part of the process?

ddtaylor commented on Bluesky: Updated Terms and Policies bsky.social/about/blog/08... · Posted by u/mschuster91

ddtaylor · 10 days ago

It's not the fault of BlueSky or their users, but I really haven't enjoyed the social media climate right now. If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y. For some subjects that is BlueSky and for others it would be platforms I don't want to participate in.

I think the reality is that most social media platforms will inevitability create hyper-polarized audiences that do little more than generate content.

ddtaylor commented on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project · Posted by u/marcjschmidt

brettpro · 11 days ago

> What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things

It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.

What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?

ddtaylor · 11 days ago

> It is exceptionally easy to tell someone else to spend time and money for a cause you philosophically agree with.

It's advice I have followed myself and with expense.

> What will you, specifically, do to help this person in this case?

In this case I would be willing to help the NPM listings stay under his control and all of the other places he is already using the name "deepkit". I would help him expand that footprint if needed. I would help amplify his voice by publishing a blog entry. I don't have a large blog, but adding your voice has value. Right now this company sees this as X risk and Y cost and those numbers are low. If they have an invalid trademark ruling they may be able to force the issue eventually in some places, but don't make it easy for them.

If a prison analogy is needed, it's not what you see in the movies. Nobody shows up to prison and does the whole "fight the biggest guy" because they want to look tough etc. In the real world that gets you stabbed in your sleep. What happens instead is bullies who can and will win the fight in the long run are deterred by having to do the work and move to the weakest targets.

I don't know how much work the adversarial company has budgeted, what they think X or Y are, etc. What I think is important is to raise the cost, which is measured in many ways besides money.

ddtaylor commented on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project · Posted by u/marcjschmidt

dannyobrien · 11 days ago

It's fairly unusual for FLOSS projects to register any trademark, and (despite this lack of strict IP protection) it's also very unusual for the owner of a trademark to ask or require a FLOSS project to change their name because it violates a trademark. Not completely unheard of, but still rare.

I don't know why you decided to trademark your project name, but I think the biggest issue here is that trademark law is naturally the domain of IP rightsholders and an outlook that presumes and enforces scarcity when it comes to names, name spaces, and digital content.

There aren't that many reasons why FLOSS projects need to work within that same domain. My thought is that it is better to try and defend the environment of a digital commons that exists outside of them, than to enter into it and try to participate in a quite alien system of existing IP law, which has a lot of presumptions and standards that, as you say, don't really match the world you work within.

ddtaylor · 11 days ago

I disagree.

You will be asked to prove you have marks to do things like be listed in the app store. You need to prove your identity with third party legal companies that look into your company and the marks you are using. If you don't own those marks you probably won't get your app published.

Many examples come to mind, but basically anytime a FOSS app goes into the app stores, like KDE. In the past we mostly argued about who should be the person that has to act as the app owner etc. or created foundations or other legal entities to bridge this gap.

Look at elementaryOS as well. They attempted to assert rights to marks they don't own and it created a fiasco for them. They are virtually irrelevant now in the Linux space. All of the developers left the project besides one who is struggling with mental illness.

ddtaylor commented on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project · Posted by u/marcjschmidt

kriro · 11 days ago

I saw on Reddit, that you already reached out to some people in the OSS space that might have the legal expertise. This actually seems like a very relevant case to me. If a trademark is granted to an open source project, it seems ridiculous to me to apply market based use criteria.

Tbh...use should already be satisfied by having a Github or website and using the registered name.

Keep us posted.

ddtaylor · 11 days ago

> use should already be satisfied

A lot of posts on HN are about things that should have happened already. Every few days there is a story about a person doing something pretty boring and standard, but they can't because a payment processor or large regulatory body got involved and the computer went "boop boop" and now someone can't have money or continue to invent things. Sorry, pull the slot machine again and see if you get lucky?

ddtaylor commented on VC-backed company just killed my EU trademark for a small OSS project · Posted by u/marcjschmidt

ddtaylor · 11 days ago

I don't have advice on if you should pursue "the fight" or not.

What I do think is important is to not disappear or go quietly when these companies attempt these things. I will probably get a lot of flack for it, but an example would be Google with the Go programming language. There was an existing language already developed and being used under that name. Google wanted to call it Go for "bigger" reasons and so they did.

Who is supposed to "fight" that?

In my opinion it's the maintainers of distros and maintainers of repositories. If they want to call their thing "foo" and there is already a "foo" in the repository, that sucks, kick rocks or call yours "foo-company-thing" since you're the one creating issues. You can likewise take the responsibility of explaining to your users why "foo-company-thing" is the name in all of the Internet as a whole. We didn't create those problems and I don't want to spend any of my time "solving" them for free.

ddtaylor commented on Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol blog.nginx.org/blog/nativ... · Posted by u/phickey

clvx · 12 days ago

But you have to have your dns api key loaded and many dns providers don’t allow api keys per zone. I do like it but a compromise could be awful.

ddtaylor · 11 days ago

It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but you can actually just publish the DNS records yourself. It's clear they are on the way out though as I believe it's only a 30 day valid certificate or something.

I use this for my Jellyfin server at home so that anyone can just type in blah.foo regardless of if their device supports anything like mDNS, as half the devices claim to support it but do not correctly.