I think Bob will have something to say about this.

This is a tempest in a teapot. They won't be able to enforce their trademark outside of their specific market niche, so unless Pat V. was going to make a Slackware app (the horror!) to compete in the same marketplace, this is irrelevant; for example, actual window cleaners can safely call their company "Bob's Windows" and there's not a jack Micro$oft can do about that. OTOH, marketing a "Bob's Windows" operating system would quickly result in lawyers dropping from the sky, SWAT team style.

Basically it's just an advanced webchat. There's nothing in it that you won't find somewhere else, but everything is nicely integrated, easy to expand, very easy to use, and setting it up takes zero effort. Hm, a bit like Slackware, isn't it? At work I've been using Slack (no "app", just my Slackware box + Firefox) for more than a year and it's proven to be a very useful tool whose functionality would be difficult to replicate with other tools.

From our little community's point of the view the name choice is a bit unfortunate, but the name fits, and propably they've never heard of Slackware before.

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This is most likely the case.

Actually, I find that extremely unlikely.

First of all, presumably the code was written at least partially by professional programmers. I cannot imagine anyone with enough exposure to write code at this level not having encountered Slackware, even M$ only developers.

But more importantly - they had to go through some minimal process to select and presumably register their organization, company, trademark, brand, whatever. With a single half-hearted online search for pre-existing versions of their choices it would not be possible to miss Slackware in the internet or computing contexts... so I do not see how those responsible would not be negligent if they claim to have done whatever constitutes due diligence in that regard.

My guess is that they thought the name was cool, simply had no actual respect for others who used it, all had a good laugh about, "Slackware, yea right... what are they going to do, sue us?", then laid claim to the name.

But then, I am irrecoverably cynical.

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Astrogeek, I believe that your idea that they might have exercised even minimal due diligence before picking a name reveals that you are, at heart, an optimist.

In some ways, but not in this realm...

But either way, if they did, and especially if they didn't perform the very slightest pretend-like form of due diligence before squatting on everyone else with their claims, it is a perfect case in point of my first post in this thread: It illustrates the wasting pointlessness and inherent imbalance and unfairness in the concept and application of "intellectual property".

We must respect each other and deal with each other as human beings, not as expressions of some legal principle in someone else's system of law. Real respect, not play like corporate policy legal department mock-respect.

Just a random little tidbit, I just did a google search for slack, and none of the first 15 pages of results were for Slackware. Granted, the results would've been quite different before they took off, but slack does not seem to be a very popular way to refer to Slackware, at least according to current Google results.

Indeed. After reading the comments on that site that was my gut reaction as well.

Not in and of itself, no, but it's a very common prefix for Slackware related tools, projects, and websites: slackbuilds.org being the most obvious example.

I agree that slack is used a lot in regards to tools and sites, but the word by itself, is not very relatable to Slackware in current Google searches. I would be curious to see how it would've faired before the project started or got popular. It would probably be higher in Google searches, but I'm curious to what extent.

Well, Slackbuilds and Slackware since 13.0 put a copyright claim in their trivial bash scripts that package other people's work. That's uncool. I doubt that both have the resources to support their claims. But in the crazy world we live in Slack has a market value of 2.8 billion. I am sure there is an army of lawyers ready to defend their claims, no matter how crazy they are. So if some day the guys at Slack notice the existence of Slack{ware, builds} and that makes them upset, Slackware and SBO will get what they asked for.


Cheers

The value is based on venture capitol investors.

And, yes... It is indeed nearly impossible that the founders did not know about Slackware because they built the original system on an IRC back end. A back end that is now proprietary, recorded and view-able by your boss, even private conversations. Unless the echo-boomers are completely daft, they'll scoff at this level of privacy intrusion in the workplace.

Whether or not the people behind this company did any research before picking a name should be irrelevant. If they want to get a copyright for the name, they would need to apply for a copyright. I assume the organisations that issue copyrights check to see if the name has already been given a copyright. If not, multiple copyrights would be granted.

"I want to get a copyright for this name or symbol."
(Type on keyboard.)
"That name/symbol has already been registered/is not registered."

Wait, using an open source license is uncool? How?

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