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Blog: Trademarked software branding

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template: post
title: Trademarked software branding
author: flewkey
timestamp: 1663456114
There is a lot of open source software that has trademark restrictions, and
those restrictions give maintainers the freedom to support official builds of
their software.
This is not a problem when the trademarked branding is separated from the open
source codebase (e.g., [Google Chrome](https://www.google.com/chrome/) and
[Chromium](https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/)), but I rarely see that.
A lot of the time, the developers _bake their trademarked branding into the
source code_, and this is a bane for third-party developers and packagers.
When that happens, there are two options:
* Use scripts to debrandify the software
* [VSCode](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) → [VSCodium](https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium)
* Maintain a fork of the software
* [Vital](https://github.com/mtytel/vital) → [Vitalium](https://github.com/DISTRHO/DISTRHO-Ports/tree/master/ports-juce6/vitalium)
* [MultiMC](https://github.com/MultiMC/Launcher) → [PolyMC](https://github.com/PolyMC/PolyMC)
* [Audacity](https://github.com/audacity/audacity) → [Saucedacity](https://github.com/saucedacity/saucedacity)
Thankfully, not all software is like this, and some projects enable packagers
and developers to modify the branding at build time.
* [Firefox](https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/branding)
* [Pale Moon](https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/src/branch/master/palemoon/branding)
* [Zrythm](https://github.com/zrythm/zrythm/blob/master/PACKAGING.md#trademarks)
I could probably submit patches to software like MultiMC to add similar branding
options, but convincing upstream maintainers to approve opinionated changes like
that could be difficult. Some might support it to reduce the amount of trademark
infringement, but others might oppose it to dissuade people from releasing
unofficial builds.
In any case, I will try to work with the upstream maintainers the next time I
deal with trademarked branding. It’s certainly smarter than writing a script
that runs `sed -i s/software/softwarium/` on the localization files.