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Wasmer and Trademarks

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Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#41

Post by syrusakbary »

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…

Just trying to prove a point! I kind of enjoy discussing this things openly.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#42

Post by mythz »

The fact Wasmer even attempted to do this, the PR spin to try cover their motivations and the deceitful astro turfing in this thread by Wasmer employees is enough for me to distrust & discount the entire company and its products entirely.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#43

Post by donut-yogurt »

ledgerdev wrote: post #27

Anyone know why they were rejected from Bytecode Alliance?

I believe it all started when Wasmer's founder allegedly sexually harassed a member of the Bytecode Alliance. From the outside it seems any collaboration was doomed from the start, and the trademark applications and internal conflicts didn't help Wasmer one bit.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#44

Post by slimsag »

donut-yogurt wrote: post #43
ledgerdev wrote: post #27

Anyone know why they were rejected from Bytecode Alliance?

I believe it all started when Wasmer's founder allegedly sexually harassed a member of the Bytecode Alliance. From the outside it seems any collaboration was doomed from the start, and the trademark applications and internal conflicts didn't help Wasmer one bit.

I don't like Wasmer one bit, seems like an aggressive startup with a shady business model that is ultimately bad for the WASM ecosystem.

It's possible what you say is true, but, how could anyone judge the validity of such an allegation from a throwaway account without more info?

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#45

Post by tptacek »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #38
colejohnson66 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The person you're responding to could simply provide every closed source TLS library as an example, because Heartbleed (a memory leak caused by implementing a TLS feature nobody was using) was exclusive to OpenSSL.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#46

Post by srcreigh »

syrusakbary wrote: post #37
srcreigh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peopl…

I have no problems paying for good services. Is quiver still available and supported? When I checked the demo website a few weeks ago it seemed a bit abandoned. [0] We seem to be doing well enough by disabling middleware promise wrapping via middleware manager [1]. Our median graphQL API response times got 2x faster with that config change. However, IIRC we are still seeing around 150 promises in one GraphQL request when I'd like to see around 1. I am interested in quiver for that reason.

Anyway, the problem isn't about charging for your work. It's about having a track record of charging for closed source additions to your own open source software platform meanwhile saying wasmer and sibling projects will be free forever as if that's how it's always been with everything else.

[0]: https://graphql-quiver.com/benchmarks/

[1]: https://github.com/graphql-python/graphql-core-legacy/blob/m...

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#47

Post by syrusakbary »

srcreigh wrote: post #46
syrusakbary wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

I have no problems paying for good services. Is quiver still available and supported? When I checked the demo website a few weeks ago it seemed a bit abandoned. [0] We seem to be doing well enough by disabling middleware promise wrapping via middleware manager [1]. Our median graphQL API response times got 2x faster with that config change. However, IIRC we are still seeing around 150 promises in one GraphQL request…

> It's about having a track record of charging for closed source additions to your own open source software platform

This is completely false. In fact, it has been rather the opposite. Thanks to Quiver I did improved a lot of things on the open-source GraphQL-core that benefited the whole community.

Quiver was built as a completely new product, and to be crystal clear: it never took any open-source bits out of Graphene or GraphQL-core. Basically, anything that was open-source did continue being open-source. That's as true for Graphene as it is for Wasmer.

I'm genuinely curious. On which ground you based your allegations?

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#48

Post by HWR_14 »

paxys wrote: post #12
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…

Yep. The post makes it sound like they abandoned the application because of the goodness of their hearts, but really it was obviously going to be rejected because they had no response to the straightforward questions by the USPTO.

It wasn't going to be rejected. It was rejected for solid reasons and they decided not to waste time appealing.

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#49

Post by donut-yogurt »

slimsag wrote: post #44
donut-yogurt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it all started when Wasmer's founder allegedly sexually harassed a member of the Bytecode Alliance. From the outside it seems any collaboration was doomed from the start, and the trademark applications and internal conflicts didn't help Wasmer one bit.

I don't like Wasmer one bit, seems like an aggressive startup with a shady business model that is ultimately bad for the WASM ecosystem. It's possible what you say is true, but, how could anyone judge the validity of such an allegation from a throwaway account without more info?

I realize it's not ideal, but whether inappropriate behavior took place or not is irrelevant to Wasmer's relationship to the Alliance. For all we know, it could be a misunderstanding due to different cultures (which is what the founder claimed).

What is relevant, though, is that a member of the Alliance made public claims of inappropriate behavior by Wasmer's founder and, nearly a year later, boosted them to justify why they weren't personally collaborating. I'm not going to link this for the benefit of the victim, but in fairness they did publish this online, and you can still find it if you're really interested.

And once you take this background into context, some of the issues Wasmer faces just seem to click. Consider the late-cofounder post-mortem you linked in a different thread:

> Another point: Syrus Akbary also has made many public errors that have created hostility against the company.

Could it be about different issues? Well, certainly, but that one issue was steaming for a year within the Alliance, so...

Re: Wasmer and Trademarks

#50

Post by syrusakbary »

shkkmo wrote: post #34
burnte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We didn't pretend to put fault on anyone, just portray the situation as it happened.

I think is worth to make one thing clear: as CEO the fault is and ultimately will be always mine. Not the lawyers, not anyone else.

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