I feel like the Microsoft employee really wanted to avoid the, for lack of a better term, Redditization of the Github issue. I see many cases where a maintainer takes an unpopular stance and is bombared with downvotes and comments, and it becomes a slam dunk contest of who can make the better quip in the replies.
Expecting a quick response on something legal from MSFT, on Github of all places, is misguided in the first place. (There’s low-hanging fruit here about how hard it is to get good answers on official Windows support forums, but I won’t go after it.)
First of all, to be fair: the article omits (I assume accidentally) the very last comment, which bans the Microsoft MVP (Microsofts equivalent of Mozilla Techspeakers and similar) in question for 7 days and mentions that they will face other consequences if they don’t change their way of speaking about other FOSS projects.
Still, this reeks of the Metro situation. For those that don’t remember, the new tiled GUI and associated framework for Windows used to be called Metro - only later figuring out that that’s a name of an important wholesale brand in Europe. Which happens to be the largest software distributor through their chains Saturn and Media Markt. They didn’t end up settling this in court, but Microsofts legal trademark review doesn’t seem to be the best.
I don’t get why people think Microsoft should discuss this on GitHub? Nobody who has a GitHub account at Microsoft is qualified to speak on a trademark issue. The reality is that their legal department seems to have dropped the ball and the only thing the devs can really say to this is “It’s been through legal” even if they were wrong. It’s not like they can ignore a trademark, so we will probably see a rebrand pretty soon.
It’s also not unheard of that Microsoft’s legal department misses checking German trademarks. Modern UI was called Metro UI at some point, too (https://www.techpluto.com/metro-ui-renamed/)
SkyDrive had to be renamed OneDrive because of a trademark dispute with Sky Group in the UK. Google has to rename Team Drives to Shared Drives for a similar reason. Big company lawyers often get trademarks wrong. If you’re using such common words, it’s likely to be used by other companies, too.
The person who was an ass about it didn’t work for Microsoft, and was banned from commenting on Microsoft repos for 7 days according to the repo code of conduct agreement. In addition, a Microsoft employee can’t admit to knowing or not knowing about them on behalf of the company. If they did, legal would have their ass and he’d probably get them in trouble. Remember, anything you say can and will be used against you.
If I can say “I didn’t know about that” and that can be construed to mean “Microsoft didn’t know about that,” then that’s bananas. Not every person at a company knows every single thing. If I were speaking on behalf of Microsoft, all I would be saying is “at least one person at Microsoft does not know about the existing Maui project.” And I’m not claiming I will do anything about it, just that I personally will attempt to learn about it by asking someone else at the company.
Either way, in this position I would probably ask someone with more context how to respond before firing off something on GitHub. That could be exactly what happened here. So I see your point.
On Lobste.rs I’m not constantly on guard about what I say or how I say it. I’m sure I’ve written comments that could be interpreted as an opinion held by Google, or Google employees in general. I really could not tell you if I’ve written “we…” anything or not. I don’t think about it and I don’t care to. But I sure wouldn’t say “we didn’t know about this trademark” when speaking as a Google employee on a Google repo that Google pays me to work on.
It’s not so much that they know about it or not. It’s more about acknowledging that there is a trademark issue. If he had acknowledged the others trademark then they would be admitting to negligence from the get-go, severely limiting their options in court or settlement negotiations. Their best course of action, legally speaking, is to not acknowledge the others existence. It looks pretty dumb from a PR point of view, but legal doesn’t care about our opinions of the company as long as it saves them a couple millions from a lawsuit.
Why do you think microsofts projects should be any different from any other project on github? Most projects on github use the platform for all kinds of changes. The fact that their legal and PR departments don’t seem to be aware of github doesn’t mean that the developer who has the issue is doing it wrong, it means that MS has to catch up with the way software projects work today.
How could they miss this during their legal review? Oh, maybe that’s why:
What, a large rich corporation considering European trademarks an afterthought and who cares, they can pay off any legal slapping because it’s a pittance? Say it ain’t so Joe!
MAUI or “MAUI Runtime” is also a feature phone OS from MediaTek. I’m not sure if it’s still being developed/sold, but I encountered a bunch of User-Agents last week while writing a UA parsing library.
If you want to see all the comments on that GitHub issue without clicking “Show comment” a zillion times:
That Dan Siegel fella seems … unpleasant. This seems more like an issue with him as a person than Microsoft as a company. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t work for Microsoft or even contribute to this MAUI. It’s just a asshole derailing random issues which is probably the reason why it was closed with “I don’t believe this is the forum for this discussion”, as it was already seriously derailed by that time; it’s really hard to salvage these kind of discussions in to anything constructive.
He was also blocked for a week (see last comment), which further goes to show he’s hardly speaking for Microsoft.
What’s also not helping is:
8:14 PM UTC: In a move that could be out of a corporate playbook for shitstorm de-escalation, the Microsoft employee posts his work mail address (which anyone could find on the net easily anyhow) and hence hopes to stop the public discussion about the issue on GitHub.
So when someone tries to be constructive it’s still bad? Good show.
The kind of name conflicts are annoying; years ago I wrote a little script to download videos from the Dutch public broadcast website. Somewhat to my surprise I got a lot of emails and feedback on it, and spent quite some time polishing it (I spent most of my time getting the bloody Windows version to work well, even though I never use Windows).
Then someone created a website with the name of my project for a similar (closed source, web-based) tool. I emailed them with “hey, cool website, but I’ve been maintaining a tool with the same name and purpose for the last 4 years, maybe it would be better to choose a different name?” They were friendly enough and exchanged some discussions but they were unwilling to change the name and I ended up having to rename my tool :-/
Either way, this entire story can be summarized as “asshole is asshole on GitHub issues”. If I wrote a rant about it every time it happened to me I’d have a hell of a lot more articles on my website. But, you know, when it’s done by something in connection with Microsoft then it’s more confirmation bias that Microsoft is evil and running a paedophilic sex ring from a Redmond pizza restaurant basement … or something 🤷♂️😒
.NET MAUI seems interesting. I wonder how it compares to Flutter or React Native? It’s good to see continued resources being put into UI frameworks, as hipping an entire browser for every app seems inefficient and wasteful.
More on topic, I wonder how it actually compares to the Maui that it streamrolls, which seemingly has the same cross platform / cross device goals, even if less far along in terms of available targets. On the surface (no MSFT Surface pun intended) it’s two projects shouting passed each other “I’M THE MULTI-PLATFROM APP UI” – “I’M THE MULTI-PLATFORM APP UI, AND IVE BEEN STANDING HERE FOR 5 YEARS” – “I SAID I’M THE MULTI-PLATFORM APP UI, AND I’M NEW”
Call me meta, but I’m more interested in seeing how Lobsters handles this story, in comparison with the latest bit of qmail drama posted by a new arrival.
I feel like the Microsoft employee really wanted to avoid the, for lack of a better term, Redditization of the Github issue. I see many cases where a maintainer takes an unpopular stance and is bombared with downvotes and comments, and it becomes a slam dunk contest of who can make the better quip in the replies.
Expecting a quick response on something legal from MSFT, on Github of all places, is misguided in the first place. (There’s low-hanging fruit here about how hard it is to get good answers on official Windows support forums, but I won’t go after it.)
First of all, to be fair: the article omits (I assume accidentally) the very last comment, which bans the Microsoft MVP (Microsofts equivalent of Mozilla Techspeakers and similar) in question for 7 days and mentions that they will face other consequences if they don’t change their way of speaking about other FOSS projects.
Still, this reeks of the Metro situation. For those that don’t remember, the new tiled GUI and associated framework for Windows used to be called Metro - only later figuring out that that’s a name of an important wholesale brand in Europe. Which happens to be the largest software distributor through their chains Saturn and Media Markt. They didn’t end up settling this in court, but Microsofts legal trademark review doesn’t seem to be the best.
The wholesale brand is not in the UI business.. aren’t trademarks only infringing if they’re actually confusable brands in the same-ish industry?
(Which is the case for MAUI, but it seems bizzare that “Metro UI” would be a problem)
The brand is broadly registered, also for software. Second: your big business partner might just be grumpy, which is enough.
I don’t get why people think Microsoft should discuss this on GitHub? Nobody who has a GitHub account at Microsoft is qualified to speak on a trademark issue. The reality is that their legal department seems to have dropped the ball and the only thing the devs can really say to this is “It’s been through legal” even if they were wrong. It’s not like they can ignore a trademark, so we will probably see a rebrand pretty soon.
It’s also not unheard of that Microsoft’s legal department misses checking German trademarks. Modern UI was called Metro UI at some point, too (https://www.techpluto.com/metro-ui-renamed/)
SkyDrive had to be renamed OneDrive because of a trademark dispute with Sky Group in the UK. Google has to rename Team Drives to Shared Drives for a similar reason. Big company lawyers often get trademarks wrong. If you’re using such common words, it’s likely to be used by other companies, too.
I would have said “I didn’t know that, I’ll double check about this with legal” instead of “perhaps the Linux project should change its name […]”
No reason to be an ass about it.
The person who was an ass about it didn’t work for Microsoft, and was banned from commenting on Microsoft repos for 7 days according to the repo code of conduct agreement. In addition, a Microsoft employee can’t admit to knowing or not knowing about them on behalf of the company. If they did, legal would have their ass and he’d probably get them in trouble. Remember, anything you say can and will be used against you.
If I can say “I didn’t know about that” and that can be construed to mean “Microsoft didn’t know about that,” then that’s bananas. Not every person at a company knows every single thing. If I were speaking on behalf of Microsoft, all I would be saying is “at least one person at Microsoft does not know about the existing Maui project.” And I’m not claiming I will do anything about it, just that I personally will attempt to learn about it by asking someone else at the company.
Either way, in this position I would probably ask someone with more context how to respond before firing off something on GitHub. That could be exactly what happened here. So I see your point.
Yet you feel the need to express in your profile that opinions are your own and not Google’s?
Signatures to that effect go back to 1980s Usenet at the very least.
It’s likely a cargo cult but it’s one with a long history.
On Lobste.rs I’m not constantly on guard about what I say or how I say it. I’m sure I’ve written comments that could be interpreted as an opinion held by Google, or Google employees in general. I really could not tell you if I’ve written “we…” anything or not. I don’t think about it and I don’t care to. But I sure wouldn’t say “we didn’t know about this trademark” when speaking as a Google employee on a Google repo that Google pays me to work on.
It’s not so much that they know about it or not. It’s more about acknowledging that there is a trademark issue. If he had acknowledged the others trademark then they would be admitting to negligence from the get-go, severely limiting their options in court or settlement negotiations. Their best course of action, legally speaking, is to not acknowledge the others existence. It looks pretty dumb from a PR point of view, but legal doesn’t care about our opinions of the company as long as it saves them a couple millions from a lawsuit.
Why do you think microsofts projects should be any different from any other project on github? Most projects on github use the platform for all kinds of changes. The fact that their legal and PR departments don’t seem to be aware of github doesn’t mean that the developer who has the issue is doing it wrong, it means that MS has to catch up with the way software projects work today.
What, a large rich corporation considering European trademarks an afterthought and who cares, they can pay off any legal slapping because it’s a pittance? Say it ain’t so Joe!
What a stupid result of a stupid focus group lol
MAUI or “MAUI Runtime” is also a feature phone OS from MediaTek. I’m not sure if it’s still being developed/sold, but I encountered a bunch of User-Agents last week while writing a UA parsing library.
If you want to see all the comments on that GitHub issue without clicking “Show comment” a zillion times:
That Dan Siegel fella seems … unpleasant. This seems more like an issue with him as a person than Microsoft as a company. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t work for Microsoft or even contribute to this MAUI. It’s just a asshole derailing random issues which is probably the reason why it was closed with “I don’t believe this is the forum for this discussion”, as it was already seriously derailed by that time; it’s really hard to salvage these kind of discussions in to anything constructive.
He was also blocked for a week (see last comment), which further goes to show he’s hardly speaking for Microsoft.
What’s also not helping is:
So when someone tries to be constructive it’s still bad? Good show.
The kind of name conflicts are annoying; years ago I wrote a little script to download videos from the Dutch public broadcast website. Somewhat to my surprise I got a lot of emails and feedback on it, and spent quite some time polishing it (I spent most of my time getting the bloody Windows version to work well, even though I never use Windows).
Then someone created a website with the name of my project for a similar (closed source, web-based) tool. I emailed them with “hey, cool website, but I’ve been maintaining a tool with the same name and purpose for the last 4 years, maybe it would be better to choose a different name?” They were friendly enough and exchanged some discussions but they were unwilling to change the name and I ended up having to rename my tool :-/
Either way, this entire story can be summarized as “asshole is asshole on GitHub issues”. If I wrote a rant about it every time it happened to me I’d have a hell of a lot more articles on my website. But, you know, when it’s done by something in connection with Microsoft then it’s more confirmation bias that Microsoft is evil and running a paedophilic sex ring from a Redmond pizza restaurant basement … or something 🤷♂️😒
.NET MAUI seems interesting. I wonder how it compares to Flutter or React Native? It’s good to see continued resources being put into UI frameworks, as hipping an entire browser for every app seems inefficient and wasteful.
More on topic, I wonder how it actually compares to the Maui that it streamrolls, which seemingly has the same cross platform / cross device goals, even if less far along in terms of available targets. On the surface (no MSFT Surface pun intended) it’s two projects shouting passed each other “I’M THE MULTI-PLATFROM APP UI” – “I’M THE MULTI-PLATFORM APP UI, AND IVE BEEN STANDING HERE FOR 5 YEARS” – “I SAID I’M THE MULTI-PLATFORM APP UI, AND I’M NEW”
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35#issuecomment-631056170
that’s where the thread should have stopped. legal cleared it and I doubt they are doing their work on github
this is an issue, but it’s not going to be solved by dunking on the developers
Open source drama at its best. Someone get the popcorn! :D
Call me meta, but I’m more interested in seeing how Lobsters handles this story, in comparison with the latest bit of qmail drama posted by a new arrival.
I flagged this as off-topic as well ;)
Flagged as off-topic since it is basically forum drama. It is also mis-tagged, only
rantandlawbeing reasonably relevant.