the planned rename?

[sten0]

Hi @joostkremers,

What is the status of the rename we discussed last year? Do I have the go-ahead to package writeroom-mode for Debian (will propagate to Ubuntu's future versions)? I don't want to cause any trouble for you, you know :-)

https://bugs.debian.org/861124

Cheers,
Nicholas

[joostkremers]

Hi Nicholas,

sorry for being so completely unresponsive...

I've tried on and off to come up with an alternative name, but there's nothing that I feel I could live with...

[sten0]

Joost Kremers <notifications@github.com> writes:

Hi Nicholas, sorry for being so completely unresponsive... I've tried on and off to come up with an alternative name, but there's nothing that I feel I could live with...

Sorry, your reply caught me at an exceptionally busy time and fell through the cracks. Since you closed this issue I guess I'll give up packaging writeroom. Oh well... Thank you for the correspondences over the years, it was a pleasure! Best, Nicholas

[anarcat]

so what are we talking about here exactly? the one major thing i could find is the iOS "writeroom app" (alternative.to link because the original site HTTPS cert expired in 2019). but the alternative.to says that the program is discontinued:

The program is no longer available for iOS. The Mac version, v3.2.1, released in August 2012, can be still bought from the AppStore.

There's another homepage for that product and from there i could find links to reviews as far back as 2006, so it definitely has a prior art claim over the elisp project (which dates from 2012 according to 4894895).

That said, there are a lot of programs that were inspired by writeroom and reused its name in some form:

• coderoom
• darkroom (which is also an elisp package)
• jdarkroom (clone of the above)
• pyroom
• RubyRoom
• textroom

all of those seem to be inspired by writeroom and have not, as far as i know, suffered from legal consequences from their name.

nor has this project, which brings me to the question: do we really need to worry about this? isn't this the kind of thing we can assume it's part of a "fair use" doctrine of some sort?

"write room", after all, is just two common word without any change other than sticking them together. if you look for those in a search engine, you find plenty of other similarly named (but some unrelated) projects:

• the write room - "a showcase for new and established writers" (2008)
• the write room LLC - "Editing & Publishing Services For Writers & Authors" (2004)
• the write room - a literary magazine (2010)
• write the room - literary activities for kindergarden kids
• the room to write - "501(c)3 nonprofit governed by a Board of Directors who care deeply for the mission and the community of writers and illustrators they work to serve" (2013)

... it kind of goes on like this. so if that project would start litigating, it could get in trouble itself, although maybe it could argue it is in a different trademarking space.

anyways. point is, maybe we can cross that bridge when we get there?

otherwise just call the project elroom or elpa-writeroom-mode or elpa-write-room-mode or the-write-room or "the right mood" or something. :)

(note that the wright room is already taken, while you're here. ;))

[joostkremers]

Hi Nicholas,

My apologies, it's been so long I wasn't sure you were still following this thread. I decided to close this issue because I haven't been able to come up with a better name and, to be honest, I'm not so keen anymore on changing it anymore.

There's no procedure for changing the name of a Melpa package, it seems. I'd have to create a new package but there wouldn't be an automatic way of moving the users of writeroom-mode to it. And I believe Melpa is more important as a platform for distributing Emacs packages than a distro's repository, because it's what everybody is using.

Of course I wouldn't mind if writeroom-mode is also distributed as a Debian package, but I hope you can understand why I won't change the package's name to make that possible.

Best,

Joost