Recently a saw an article come across my feed that Notepad++ was now available on MacOS.

Turns out that was partially true.

TL;DR; Trademarks are incredibly important to the success of open source projects, and one should not be criticized for trying to protect them.

What happened was someone ported Notepad++ to MacOS, but it wasn’t the maintainer. Thus the functionality provided by the application was available on MacOS, but not an actual “Notepad++” version.

I haven’t used Windows for anything important for over twenty years, but even I knew that Notepad++ is considered a very good application. While I don’t have a need for a new editor, having options is a good thing, so having Notepad++ on MacOS is good, right?

Well, the answer is: it depends.

Almost exactly 17 years ago I wrote a long post about this very thing with respect to a similar situation faced by Canonical, and it reflected an issue we faced with OpenNMS. In the early days of the project, a company in California posted “We have OpenNMS for OSX!”.

This was at the same time a lot of my open source developer friends were switching over to Macs, so we were looking at porting OpenNMS to OSX. But we required Java 1.2 for performance reasons, and it wasn’t generally available yet on that O/S.

What this person had done is remove all of the performance improvements that required version 1.2 so that it would compile. They also came up with a totally new versioning system and a new forum for folks to talk about this port, separate from our main channels.

While having someone take your product and invest the time to port it is flattering, it can really confuse the market. If an organization were to review an under-performing version and then say your product sucks, that is not good. Having different versions and different sites is also confusing.

So Don Ho wasn’t being an asshole when he tried to protect the Notepad++ trademark. He was trying to protect the reputation that he and the rest of the Notepad++ community had built over all these years.

Yet he received abuse for this action, which is mentioned in the post that the naming issue has been resolved.

I strongly recommend that if you are eager to port a particular project to a new platform, simply reach out to the current maintainers and get their feedback first. My guess is that you will find that they are open to it, and the only thing it may cost you is a review of your output and having to take some feedback.

If it turns out that the project isn’t interested, then by all means fork it. But understand that the biggest effort needed to make a fork successful is putting in the effort to built your own brand (which you should most certainly trademark).

Free software means you are free to create derivative works: it does not mean you are free to use someone else’s brand.