FW: trademark filings for GCC?

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Eben Moglen says having GCC as a trademark would be a good thing, so

What about __GNUC__ (the preprocessor define)?  It has been reported
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-06/msg01822.html> that Intel's nonfree
compiler defines it to masquerade as GCC.  I don't know whether trademark
protection is in this case either legally possible or philosophically
desirable, given that the name is being used as an interface and
restricting compatible implementations of an interface is generally a bad
idea, but it has been reported
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-06/msg02450.html> that Intel have used
trademarks themselves in similar ways.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk