Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wasmer and Trademarks

wasmer.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#31

Post by eatonphil »

I'm not too familiar with the state of wasm runtimes so this Frank Denis post/benchmark [0] was pretty helpful.

tldr:

> Are you looking for the best possible performance to build a “serverless” infrastructure? WAVM may be better a choice, combined with “snapshots” of the linear memory made after initialization, as done in the excellent FAASM.

> For untrusted applications, and if you are into Rust, you may want to consider lucet and its unique ability to stop/resume/reschedule execution.

> Are you looking for a one-runtime-to-rule-them-all thing for multiple components of your application, written in a variety of programming languages? wasmer will probably be the easiest to integrate.

> Are you looking for a way to test the latest WebAssembly proposals? Check out wasmtime. Ditto if you need to run WebAssembly modules from Zig. wasmtime is fast, even on ARM CPUs, although I wish I could test on one of these fancy new Apple M1 machines.

> Finally, if you need something simple, lightweight, that works everywhere, wasm3 is your friend.

[0] https://00f.net/2021/02/22/webassembly-runtimes-benchmarks/

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#32

Post by colejohnson66 »

burnte wrote: post #23
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people would say that reducing the threshold to discover security bugs is a good thing.

Security through obscurity is not security. The source WAS open, any bugs in it then are still discoverable. Opening source can actually make things more secure, the whole "many eyes" thing.

Heartbleed proved that the “many eyes” theory doesn’t always work in practice. It was in the codebase for years and no one noticed.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#33

Post by benatkin »

kasey_junk wrote: post #26
burnte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security through obscurity is not security. The source WAS open, any bugs in it then are still discoverable. Opening source can actually make things more secure, the whole "many eyes" thing.

The interesting thing in this argument is that the first person is positing axiomatically that closed source is more secure, the second person is positing that open/closed largely doesn’t matter and finally your position axiomatically is that open is more secured. We’ve known since the 70s that you (provably) can’t trust source code. We know experientially that it’s easier to diagnose code than programs. We also know…

Not quite. tptacek says "Most people would say that reducing the threshold to discover security bugs is a good thing." I think that restating what tptacek said earlier, "mostly orthoganal", to "largely doesn't matter", loses some of the meaning.

One way of seeing it is that it's mostly orthaganal at a level of all software out there, but that for those who make a serious effort to be secure, there is a lot of benefit to being open source.

There's Linus's Law, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I think if the maintainers of Linux didn't meaningfully address security concerns, it would just mean they were doing a bit better at whack-a-mole. You see this in popular open source projects like WordPress.

So I think that's why a reader might think tptacek's two comments don't jibe with each other. If you are given a choice between an open source and a closed source application, you wouldn't just assume one is more secure than another. However, if you were starting off to make a secure system, it would be a good idea to make it open source.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#34

Post by shkkmo »

burnte wrote: post #22
csomar wrote: post #6

> If we had had bad intentions at that moment we could have still pursued the trademark at that time. Instead, we left the process to expire, leading to this official response from USPTO in September of the same year: https://uspto.report/TM/88703780 “Status: Abandoned because the applicant failed to respond”. The actual rejection: https://uspto.report/TM/88703784/OOA20200227112123#2 > The attached evidence from Weba…

Those are two different applications for two different marks. The article linked Webassembly while you linked WASM.

Isn't it interesting how much the PR post (calling it an 'article' is a misnomer) downplays Wasmer's efforts to trademark "wasm"? It's almost like the effort to trademark "wasm" belies the bad faith intentions of Wasmer amd they want to avoid drawing attention to it.

The whole "it's not our fault, blame our lawyers" combined with "we decided to wait on issuing a non-apology until we thought the conversation would be productive for us" really doesn't make Wasmer look good.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#35

Post by shkkmo »

syrusakbary wrote: post #20
paulgb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasmer could have still tried to submit further evidence “Tried” is the operative word here though, no? What possible evidence could convince the USPTO to let a company trademark a name already in use for the same thing?

> What possible evidence could convince the USPTO to let a company trademark a name already in use for the same thing by a company that is not its original creator? Not sure, as we didn't tried to pursue further. Perhaps there was a way to get the trademark, or perhaps there wasn't (no idea, really... and I guess we will never know! although a negative answer is the most probable one). But there are other examples su…

> no idea, really... and I guess we will never know

Really? It appears to be blatantly obvious to everyone but you.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#36

Post by initplus »

syrusakbary wrote: post #20
paulgb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasmer could have still tried to submit further evidence “Tried” is the operative word here though, no? What possible evidence could convince the USPTO to let a company trademark a name already in use for the same thing?

> What possible evidence could convince the USPTO to let a company trademark a name already in use for the same thing by a company that is not its original creator? Not sure, as we didn't tried to pursue further. Perhaps there was a way to get the trademark, or perhaps there wasn't (no idea, really... and I guess we will never know! although a negative answer is the most probable one). But there are other examples su…

Do you see how comparing your company to Oracle is not the most flattering?

Oracle owns the Javascript trademark because it was originally owned by Sun, who trademarked it under an agreement with Netscape who are the original authors of Javascript. Oracle at least has legal claim to the trademark.

There obviously is not a way to get trademarks on WASM or Webassembly.

If you admit the trademarks were applied for in error, why continue pretending there was a chance they would be granted?

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#37

Post by syrusakbary »

srcreigh wrote: post #30
slimsag wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing[0] suspicious[1] about[2] Wasmer. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28772863 [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_web... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24904829

> But you need to know that Wasmer and its sibling projects will stay free forever. We are open source lovers, all of us, and we have a strong background on working on open source projects before joining Wasmer too. That's great. I'm sure the closed source paid 10x faster editions of the graphene Python GraphQL server written by Syrus "CEO of Graphene" and CEO of wasmer will be open sourced in this spirit. https://gi…

Bummer. What an unfortunate comment.

Many people in the Python GraphQL ecosystem are very aware of how much I pushed that ecosystem forward (in fact, I created it!) and actually cheered for the success of Quiver [1]. Probably downloads will speak louder than any words: Graphene has 1/5th of the downloads of Django (~1.2 million per month [2]), all on the spirit of an open community that is governed by many more people than myself.

If you want an open alternative to Quiver, you can start by investing your time creating it. But you are not entitled on other people's time doing it for you for free. As people say in the US: "Put your money (or time) where your mouth is".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568848

[2] https://pypistats.org/packages/graphene

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#38

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #32
burnte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security through obscurity is not security. The source WAS open, any bugs in it then are still discoverable. Opening source can actually make things more secure, the whole "many eyes" thing.

Heartbleed proved that the “many eyes” theory doesn’t always work in practice. It was in the codebase for years and no one noticed.

> Heartbleed proved that the “many eyes” theory doesn’t always work in practice. It was in the codebase for years and no one noticed.

It proved that FOSS isn't infallible, which I hope isn't that great a shock. To argue that it weakens the general argument, you would need to present a similar TLS library which avoided exploits by being closed source.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#39

Post by ledgerdev »

mfer wrote: post #7

> Wasmer, by necessity, design, and passion lives and breathes Wasm and open source. > As is dictated by our commitment to open source and the precedent of social alignment set by WebAssembly... > Although all these events still do not portray Wasmer in the best light, I hope they can at least assuage the understandable concerns of our community that we had acted in a way so fundamentally contrary to the values of op…

> Wasmer recently recently released a closed source wasm package manager. Something doesn't seem right. Anyone feel something is off here?

I have to agree. Are there any open source package managers similar to cargo?

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#40

Post by [deleted] »

initplus wrote: post #36
syrusakbary wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What possible evidence could convince the USPTO to let a company trademark a name already in use for the same thing by a company that is not its original creator? Not sure, as we didn't tried to pursue further. Perhaps there was a way to get the trademark, or perhaps there wasn't (no idea, really... and I guess we will never know! although a negative answer is the most probable one). But there are other examples su…

Do you see how comparing your company to Oracle is not the most flattering? Oracle owns the Javascript trademark because it was originally owned by Sun, who trademarked it under an agreement with Netscape who are the original authors of Javascript. Oracle at least has legal claim to the trademark. There obviously is not a way to get trademarks on WASM or Webassembly. If you admit the trademarks were applied for in er…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN