Re: Opensource.com Zsh article

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 6:34 AM Daniel Shahaf <d.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> To elaborate on that: if Alice maintains an open source product and Bob
> forks it, trademarks law requires that Bob rename the product before he
> may distribute it.

That would be true if there were actually a trademark on "zsh", but there isn't.

Copyright law might come into play because of the license terms, but
because zsh assigns copyrights on the individual files to the
individual contributors, it would be a serious headache to try to
bring a coherent claim.

This is probably one of the factors behind other OSS projects deciding
to join consortia like the Apache Foundation or Mozilla.