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A comment on The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source. Parent comment

Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by _benedict on Thursday January 26, 2023 @03:27AM (#34529154)
Nope, it isn’t special. Indeed your example is why companies try very hard to prevent words from changing meaning. Google for instance no longer means “search with Google” but to search the internet for something, with Google or some other service, and history is littered with such examples - including ones that became so prevalent they lost their trademark protection.
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by robertlagrant on Thursday January 26, 2023 @05:05AM (#34529813)
To my understanding[0] Google is still trademarked.

[0] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/google_retains_its_t...

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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by _benedict on Thursday January 26, 2023 @05:29AM (#34529988)
Yep, I didn’t use them as an example of a company that has lost their trademark, only that in common usage often means something different to its original intent.
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by robertlagrant on Friday January 27, 2023 @05:31AM (#34544568)
Fair enough. I'd argue that Google pretty much does just mean "use Google".
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by mikebenfield on Thursday January 26, 2023 @06:09PM (#34540175)
I don't understand why you think this is a good counterexample. Google is still trademarked. If I make a search engine and say, "You can use my search engine to Google things," I'm probably in the wrong both legally and ethically.
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by _benedict on Friday January 27, 2023 @03:04AM (#34543765)
Open source isn’t trademarked, and probably isn’t possible to trademark. So trademark status isn’t relevant here, only the change in usage.
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by mikebenfield on Friday January 27, 2023 @01:18PM (#34549633)
You're literally the one who made the analogy of "open source" to trademarks, and now you're trying to shoot down my explanation of why your analogy doesn't work by saying trademark status is irrelevant... Good grief.
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Re:The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-... by _benedict on Friday January 27, 2023 @02:33PM (#34550642)
No, you brought up Cheerios, and I brought up a counterexample to your claim that such invented terms occupy some special status where they don’t or shouldn’t change meaning.

I then mentioned loss of trademark protection to further evidence that such words change meaning.

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