Good luck trying to enforce trademark law for namespace on a public code repository.

It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced.

Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails.

[0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...

I agree with you. And I don't understand this normalisation of threatening.

And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.

> but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions

Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t show emotions and suck up the abuse”. I’m glad he was both showing his protest and standing up to the overreach.

Does he have to be? No.

Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.

It’s not the judgment itself, it is by what standard he is judged. Everyone could judge him by their religious, cultural, personal standards. But in a solo dev vs. corporate overreach case judging him by corporatist standards bring a framing that further empowers the overreach.

There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.

Don't be confused by the "Hacker" in hacker news. Paul Graham found a cool label to get impressionable youths to want to work for him, nothing more.