
Jade, Node.js template engine, is being forced to rename due to trademark - max_
https://github.com/pugjs/jade/issues/2184
======
jpambrun
To be fair, I was rather confused when reading the title. I tough the original
JADE was being sued. Now most Google results are related to new JADE lang.
Obviously, there is a trademark issue. The fact that HN seems to like this new
JADE more should be irrelevant. I am surprised to witness such a biased
reaction here.

~~~
rodgerd
Exactly - this is literally the correct use of trademark law. HN having a
tantrum about it speaks poorly of the posters here.

~~~
niftylettuce
No, it is not.

~~~
korethr
If the purpose and correct use of trademarks is not to be a legally-protected
unique identifier to prevent confusion amongst products of the same type/class
or in the same market, then what, pray tell, _is_ it's correct use?

~~~
curun1r
The purpose of trademarks is to protect consumers, not companies.

From what I can tell about the trademark owner in this case, they make
logistics software for shipping. I fail to see how a consumer could confuse
that with an HTML template engine.

It's past time to recognize that 'software' is way too broad a category for a
single trademark. As 'software eats the world' and more and more industries
are automated, we need to break that down into more granular categories.

~~~
jpambrun
I don't know much about the original JADE company, but from their website
"JADE 7 is a robust development platform for business applications" where
programmes are written in the JADE language.

This is obviously an issue when searching for JADE tutorials or hiring JADE
programming experts for instance.

~~~
curun1r
Trademarks don't guarantee Google search results. They're supposed to protect
against confusion on the part of the consumer. You don't have to be a genius
to understand that an open source library isn't a commercial product.

This legal threat is solely because Jade, the trademark holder, is losing the
popularity contest with Jade, the open source library. They're trying to buy
their way to the top of Google search results with lawyers.

~~~
niftylettuce
Their trademarks in the US are at least abandoned - therefore not enforcable.
In the UK I'm not sure how NZ TM law applies, or where Jade was originally
created (Canada).

------
tjholowaychuk
Such a joke. Good luck to that company, they can come over to Canada and sue
me as well, one person isn't solely responsible for a project so that's unfair
to pin it on Forbes. I've never even heard of their lame product, make
yourself look really bad, that will help!

Also (our) Jade has been around for many many years, do they really have the
legal grounds to do this now?

------
ChuckMcM
Heh, way back I got a letter from them too. I was talking about an integrated
Java Application Development Environment (JADE) at the time. It was sort of a
unikernel with all the Java system classes compiled into code and only the
application classes (policy) being interpreted by the JVM.

------
wldlyinaccurate
I'm really disappointed to see this happening. Studying computer science in
Christchurch, New Zealand made Jade Software a well-known name to me. They've
never been a modern or progressive company, but I used to respect them for
their successes. Now I just feel like they're letting themselves and a big OSS
community down with this petty trademark dispute.

Bad form, Jade.

~~~
djsumdog
I use to work for an OSS company in Wellington. I can only imagine the crazy
garbage going around the company e-mail list over this. (When Microsoft and
Cyanogen partnered on some things, people there went ape shit).

------
biot
That agreement he's being asked to sign is worrying. Either don't sign it or,
if you must, ensure it contains wording to the effect of removing all
references will be done on a good faith, best-effort basis. Otherwise, one
missed mention could expose you to liability.

~~~
jessaustin
Yeah it's a bad idea to just sign random shit that random assholes send.
Certainly one has no duty to so. In this case the assholes are not even in the
same hemisphere as these maintainers. Having already harvested the bad PR
involved in the name change, how likely is it that they'll spend five figures
to get any sort of lawsuit going? It's not as though signing this makes a
lawsuit _less_ likely anyway.

------
nickpsecurity
That's funny. I'm old enough remember them as a 4GL company and solution. I
passed on them specifically because they were tied to Windows platform.
Others, like Omni and WINDEV, could do multiplatform already. Most market
share went to database-style ones like PROGRESS and INFORMIX.

Funny to see they're fighting for the trademark when even most 4GL users
didn't give a shit about their product. What a lame company.

~~~
damianknz
I miss 4GL (and Vim) (and Christchurch).

~~~
nickpsecurity
Haha. WINDEV is actually going fairly strong by 4GL standards for today's
environment. Still buggy as hell with All Features No QA focus per forum
comments. Yet, they're still doing good on ease-of-use, all-in-one, RAD
concept. I remember seeing that making a web app Ajax was basically a checkbox
and then re-generates it.

A modern solution like that applying good QA and what we've learned in
tooling/language design would still be a good thing I think. Especially
considering all the lay people out there relying on Excel, VB6, etc. Could
raise them up a bit with right design.

------
niftylettuce
TM law doesn't apply here to this bully. Not competing. The customers of Jade
Software will not be confused. Don't give in to this BS.

~~~
niftylettuce
I just purchased jadesoftware.org and jadelang.net. They can have fun fighting
me now too. See
[https://github.com/pugjs/jade/issues/2231](https://github.com/pugjs/jade/issues/2231)

~~~
niftylettuce
Pushing up the sites now (editing CNAMES), will comment again here and on GH
issue when they're up.

~~~
cdcarter
The maintainers (in their FAQ) specifically said they don't want to fight
this. They're ready to move on and keep working on the project they love.
Don't make their life harder.

~~~
niftylettuce
Do you expect 2000+ packages in NPM to be renamed?

------
niftylettuce
Also I just got [http://jadeworld.org](http://jadeworld.org) and am going to
make a parody site out of it, then post it on Hacker News here for upvotes.

~~~
ceduic
Are childish provocations like these really a good idea when the authors of
Jade wanted to avoid a law suit?

------
Mizza
Total nonsense. Legal "threats" are just that - threats. They're not legally
binding in anyway. It costs nothing to send them, but gives lawyers a way to
manufacture some billable time.

Send these to /dev/null and never think twice about them.

------
ryanlol
What does jadeworld even do? I'd go to their website to find out but it seems
to be down...

~~~
saurik
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADE_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADE_\(programming_language\))

~~~
ryanlol
Suddenly the whole trademark thing seems a lot more reasonable.

------
diegorbaquero
No no no. Fight them. We are more.

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i386
I'm worried about how many people here seem to have a (at best) tenuous
understanding of the trademark system.

My new programming language will be called "nodes".

------
vortico
How will this affect the npm packages which depend on Pug/Jade? Will Jade be a
metapackage which only depends on pug?

------
niftylettuce
[http://jadeworld.org](http://jadeworld.org),
[http://jadelang.net](http://jadelang.net), and
[http://jadesoftware.org](http://jadesoftware.org) are now live. The name Jade
for a templating language is not going away anytime soon, at least for my
usage.

~~~
Cyph0n
Good job! The open-source community cannot let trolls like this win so easily.
Now we need to push them up the search rankings.

~~~
rodgerd
How thre fuck is a company that's existed before most posters on HN were born
a "troll"?

~~~
Cyph0n
Troll as in attacking an open source project that is very unrelated just
because of a similar name.

~~~
saurik
The company in question seems to be a software company that develops a
programming language called JADE. These usages are not "very unrelated" and
the name is "the same", not "similar".

~~~
jessaustin
The "Jade" of which anyone has ever heard has been around for over five years.
What took these people so long to file suit? How long does it take to
constitute a failure to police one's trademark?

~~~
jpambrun
This is not up to HN to decide, it is up to the court.

Unfortunately, we will never know since the new JADE language maintainers
agreed to the terms of the old JADE software company.

~~~
jessaustin
Which court is that?

------
niftylettuce
It's up. [http://jadeworld.org/](http://jadeworld.org/)

I also just posted a Show HN at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11002843)
for this.

~~~
niftylettuce
Thanks to this traffic generated, their site went down.
[https://i.imgur.com/8Its1a2.png](https://i.imgur.com/8Its1a2.png)

~~~
nmalaguti
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160128220329/https://www.jadew...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160128220329/https://www.jadeworld.com/)

------
jayess
It's easy to take five minutes to search the online US trademark database
before settling on a name. Of course that's not exhaustive, but it would have
avoided this situation.

~~~
Takizawa
Jade Software shows up as dead in that database. Hmmm.

~~~
themartorana
This seems rather important.

