standards: Trademarks

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1 2.3 Trademarks
1 ==============
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1 Please do not include any trademark acknowledgements in GNU software
1 packages or documentation.
1 
1    Trademark acknowledgements are the statements that such-and-such is a
1 trademark of so-and-so.  The GNU Project has no objection to the basic
1 idea of trademarks, but these acknowledgements feel like kowtowing, and
1 there is no legal requirement for them, so we don't use them.
1 
1    What is legally required, as regards other people's trademarks, is to
1 avoid using them in ways which a reader might reasonably understand as
1 naming or labeling our own programs or activities.  For example, since
1 "Objective C" is (or at least was) a trademark, we made sure to say that
1 we provide a "compiler for the Objective C language" rather than an
1 "Objective C compiler".  The latter would have been meant as a shorter
1 way of saying the former, but it does not explicitly state the
1 relationship, so it could be misinterpreted as using "Objective C" as a
1 label for the compiler rather than for the language.
1 
1    Please don't use "win" as an abbreviation for Microsoft Windows in
1 GNU software or documentation.  In hacker terminology, calling something
1 a "win" is a form of praise.  If you wish to praise Microsoft Windows
1 when speaking on your own, by all means do so, but not in GNU software.
1 Usually we write the name "Windows" in full, but when brevity is very
1 important (as in file names and sometimes symbol names), we abbreviate
1 it to "w".  For instance, the files and functions in Emacs that deal
1 with Windows start with 'w32'.
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