[Twisted-Python] suggestions for naming to help us preserve a Twisted trademark

Jonathan Lange jml at mumak.net
Thu May 29 20:11:11 EDT 2008


On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 9:15 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> Hello, Twisted community:
>
> I'd really like "twisted" (and our various "dot product" subprojects) to be
> a trademark that the software freedom conservancy can protect and defend.
>  For similar reasons, I'd like to have an unambiguous naming convention for
> projects which are *part* of Twisted versus those which are built on it or
> are compatible with it.
>
[...]
>
> I'd like to suggest, however, that new projects use the word "Twisty" in
> this context rather than the hopefully trademarked "Twisted".  i.e. if you
> are making an implementation of the protocol Bloobloo and want to give it a
> name associated with Twisted, please describe it as "Twisty Bloobloo: an
> implementation of bloobloo for Twisted", and name your packages similarly
> (twistybloobloo.stuff).  Sun has a great webpage about how to use their
> trademarks in this capacity: http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/.
>

Some thoughts:

1. The first Google result for "Twisty" for me is Twistys.com (NSFW),
which is all about pictures of scantily clad women.

2. I *still* encounter resistance to Twisted because the name conjures
up images of insanity, perversion, confusion or "unprofessionalism". I
don't think "Twisty" helps with this problem. I'm not sure that this
is a big deal though.

3. Do we have lawyers? What do they say? Can you paste/link their
advice rather than summarizing?

4. In my present situation, most of the things I'm tempted to name
"Twisted%s" are just Deferred-using APIs. It'd be nice to have a
standardish name for these, and "TwistyFoo" is as good as
"DeferredFoo", "AsyncFoo" etc. I hold out a hope that the name will
become an anachronism once Deferreds and Failures are in the stdlib.

jml




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