I wish Google learned from Go/Golang (i.e., where a nontrivial number of people refer to Go as Golang, much to the displeasure of some of the authors) and use names which are easy to search for.

I'm not looking forward to people mistyping libcrurl as libcurl and people having to second guess what the intention was.

curl might not be a trademark but EU has 'moral right of the author' rules. In my mind libcrurl is right up there with a search engine named G00gle or a software company named MikeRowSoft.

Your point is very valid, but I cant even SAY it, so I havent even gotten to the typo stage.

"Crurl" is in "rural juror" territory.

"Searching for libcrurl. Click here if you really meant libcurl."

EU rules aren't the only relevant ones, either. They are certainly among the relevant ones since the curl author is in Europe, but Google has enough ties to the US that he can probably benefit from whichever set of trademark laws are more favorable. And US laws recognize unregistered trademarks too.

> where a nontrivial number of people refer to Go as Golang

https://golang.org/

Simple names in the era of the web are not always a good idea. Also see https://www.r-project.org/

Sadly, there’s a fair amount of sniping[1] in parts of the Go community if you use “Golang” instead of “Go”.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717303

For whatever reason, "alternative" languages seem to have weird naming issues.

See also - Rust

C, D, and C++ on the other hand... And the naming of JavaScript had certainly never caused any confusion. Let's face it, programming languages have weird names.

There is a non trivial overlap between the people present for the creation of C (which followed B) and the creation of Go - so there may have been something weird in the water at Bell Labs sometime around 1980. D just followed the existing convention and C++ started out as an extension on top of C.

JavaScript on the other hand was an entirely intentional marketing move. Only issue was that the programmer they hired to create the language wasn't on the Java hype train.

Yes, an informal first approach is generally best, agreed. My suggested trademark lawyer consultation was not meant to bypass that, but merely to advise on it and to assist with any subsequent steps that the situation may merit.