[HN Gopher] Google abandoned Fastlane, it has no maintainers cur...
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       Google abandoned Fastlane, it has no maintainers currently
        
       Author : prof18
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2023-02-19 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mastodon.social)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.social)
        
       | apples_oranges wrote:
       | Twitter is the original link, this mastodon seems to be a mirror,
       | so why not link there?
       | https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1627315332716150785
        
       | vdddv wrote:
       | How can Google own the IP if this is open source
        
         | TallGuyShort wrote:
         | As a side note, the requirements in open-source licenses (such
         | as redistributing source yourself, giving attribution, etc.)
         | are only enforceable because of intellectual property. Someone
         | owns the copyright, and often has contributors assign the
         | copyright to them, and they then own the IP. The license grants
         | you conditional authorization to distribute the software,
         | provided you comply with certain requirements. If you fail to
         | do that, it's the copyright holder that can really sue.
        
         | haunter wrote:
         | IP =/= copyright
         | 
         | See Audacity. Open source but the name is registered trademark
         | and owned by the Muse Group
         | 
         | https://www.audacityteam.org/copyright/
         | 
         | https://github.com/audacity/audacity
         | 
         | Or Blender also another open source project but registered
         | trademark
         | 
         | https://www.blender.org/about/logo/
         | 
         | https://github.com/blender
         | 
         | Krita too
         | 
         | https://krita.org/en/item/krita-trademark-policy/
         | 
         | https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita
         | 
         | There are countless examples
        
           | Oxidation wrote:
           | Indeed, Linux is probably the most famous. It's trademarked
           | because someone else tried to trademark "Linux" and then
           | shake down vendors for 10%. It went to court, the trademark
           | troll lost and the trademark itself was assigned to Torvalds.
           | 
           | It's now administered by the Linux Mark Institute.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | haunter wrote:
             | That made me wonder, UNIX is also trademarked
             | https://unix.org/trademark.html
             | 
             | And there are handful of OSes registered as UNIX Certified
             | https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
             | 
             | Yet there is no single "UNIX OS"
        
           | j1elo wrote:
           | Let me add a very relevant anecdote of the difference between
           | those things.
           | 
           | Kurento the project is Apache-2 open-source, you'll find all
           | its source code here: https://github.com/Kurento/kurento
           | 
           | its website _was_ kurento .org but the trademark of the name
           | (and the domain) is owned by Twilio, who recently had the
           | nice gesture of redirecting all accesses from this domain to
           | their own, without prior warning. No replies to emails, or
           | reasons stated. Not that they needed one though, as they are
           | indeed the owners and can do whatever they want. Just a nice
           | "contribution" they made to OSS, it seems.
        
         | sethd wrote:
         | Google holds the copyright and they choose to license their IP
         | under an open source license. You could be thinking of public
         | domain.
        
           | riku_iki wrote:
           | So, maintainers can just fork it under different name?
        
             | joecool1029 wrote:
             | Just call it fasterlane or betterlane lol
        
               | politelemon wrote:
               | Or as is the fashion currently, librelane
        
               | helf wrote:
               | Or autobahn
        
             | aflag wrote:
             | If the (ex-)maintainers work for google, they'd probably
             | not do it. But, legally, they could.
        
       | calibas wrote:
       | There are still maintainers, Google's just not paying them.
       | 
       | Google gets credit for Fastlane and owns the IP, while a small
       | army of contributors do all the work for free...
        
       | password1 wrote:
       | So Google owns the IP but doesn't support the maintainers that do
       | all the work and keep it running. They take the credit, the value
       | of the brand and do nothing.
       | 
       | Can't the maintainers do a fork, continue their work with a new
       | name and then maybe start a foundation or something to attract
       | money and support it? Fastlane is a very mission critical piece
       | of software for many companies, I'm sure some of them would
       | support it if it's an indie project and not a Google property.
       | 
       | Edit: there's actually a recent discussion about this and the
       | idea of moving it to the Mobile Native Foundation.
       | https://github.com/MobileNativeFoundation/discussions/discus...
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-19 23:01 UTC)