You don't need their permission to make a portmanteau, all you need is to follow trademark law (which may or may not allow it). The policy page can go kick sand.

While true, using someone else's trademark as a prefix of your name when you are actively intending it to reference the protected use seems egregious.

Do you think many users will mistakenly believe Gitlip is an official Git project put out by the same authors as Git?

There can't be trademark infringement unless there is a likelihood of confusion.

I don't know. I do know that an incredible number of users do not understand that GitHub is NOT an official anything, and so I feel like we have an existence proof of this being a serious concern. (That said, I also can see an argument that once git allowed that to happen without a fight, or even AFAIK at least some retroactive agreement--and then further also allowed GitLab--that they don't even have an enforceable trademark anymore, at least with respect to this kind of prefix use. But like, this is a kind of oblique argument that I don't think you are already making.)

What about… GitHub, Gitlab, Gitkraken, GirButler (featured on HN recently)? The list goes on forever!

Supposedly they got written permission

Gitea?

supposedly the same

OP here. Oops, thank you for pointing that out! We weren’t aware of it. We will investigate ASAP. In the worst case, we’ll change our name.

Doesn't sound worse case to me. It could use a better name anyway.

gitlip is not a good name, but you can be sure that if a new name does not include git it will be a worse name.

How so? I think they'd want to make a more generic name, because their success so far seems to be in gluing a couple of things not directly related to git together. These are running WebAssembly on the server and using a centralized storage backend. Even if they're laser-focused on the same problem of multi-tenant version control, I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to support using CRDTs in a similar matter down the road.

right... they should call it Cloudflarelip /s

What about an old word? Agitator, legitimate, cogitate?

Is the syllable still the Mark if you pronounce it with a soft G instead of a hard G?