codeweavers

Codeweaver's Chromium a trademark lawsuit waiting to happen? CORRECTION

Correction: Jeremy White of Codeweavers emailed me to let me know that I'm very confused on this.:

Chromium isn't my name; it's Googles, and it's their open source project. They distribute bundles with explicit permission to use both source and binaries in those bundles. (In an irony, in fact, they accidentally messed up and included Chrome trademarks in a bundle that they gave permission to use, so we had to strip those out and replace them with Chromium branding).

Based on a range of posts I saw on the web this morning, which conflated Chromium with Codeweavers that it's not surprising that I was confused. Mea culpa, and sincere apologies to Jeremy and the Codeweaver gang.

Codeweavers, the company behind WINE which enables Windows applications to run on Linux, has done it again. WINE was voted a finalist in Sourceforge's Community Awards earlier this year, earning the dubious distinction of one of the open-source projects "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation."

This may be true where patents are concerned, but I think Google would have a pretty good trademark claim against Codeweavers right now.

In this case, Codeweavers has made it possible to run the Google Chrome browser on Mac OS X and Linux, and called it "Chromium." As Codeweavers founder and CEO, Jeremy White, notes on his blog, Codeweavers was "looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications."

Great, right? Yes, except for the name. Chromium has the potential to confuse would-be users as to the source of this cross-platform instantiation of Google Chrome.

United States trademark law is pretty clear on this point:… Read more