Some may have noticed if you’re into searching things up: NixOS has officially received its first trademark in community history! (and we also celebrated a birthday two weeks ago!)
This is definitely one of those “small step, giant leap” moments for the project. I can personally vouch that the Foundation has been working on this in some capacity for four years now, balancing it in and out of other Foundation priorities. I still remember chatting about the necessity of this in the Netherlands over four years ago with the Nix crew. The Foundation has had this on high priority for north of a full year now, and we’ve finally brought it home with the help of our legal and trademark partners.
The Process Behind the EU Trademark
For those curious about how the legal nuggets gets made, securing a European Union Trade Mark (EUTM) through the EUIPO involves a few phases:
Filing & Classification: We had to clearly define and classify exactly what “NixOS” covers (defending it across specific software, open-source infrastructure, and community service categories).
Absolute Grounds Examination: The registry reviews the mark to ensure it is distinct, unique, and doesn’t conflict with existing terms.
The Opposition Window: Once approved by the examiners, the trademark is published publicly, triggering a mandatory 3-month window where any entity in the EU can formally object or claim prior rights.
Final Registration: Having cleared the opposition phase without any successful challenges, the mark is officially registered and secured.
Now that the foundation is laid, the next step is building the guardrails. The SC and the Foundation Board will be working together to draft an initial trademark policy.
I want to be entirely transparent about my personal philosophy moving into this: my absolute top priority is continuing to uphold and protect the contributions of our community members and the immense time they invest in this project. A trademark policy should be another mechanism that ensures the work we all build together remains safe, recognizable, and true to the community’s values!
If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the thread below or ping my DMs, and I’ll do my best to answer them.
If we would try to take legal action against that page after copying the content and basically forking it, I’m pretty sure, we would run straight into the next scandal.
Not that I like that it exists. But I still hope for a solution that doesn’t require taking legal action.
Silly question, but looking at the official document… all mentions of the trademarked work are all-caps. Is the canonical capitalization correct? Does that matter?
The nixos.wiki already display in it’s main page that it is not official (see image). I think the issue that has been mentioned in the part in the discourse, is that it’s maintenance state is not well known (e.g no news since 2024), and it is one more point of fragmentation for our users who have to understand why there is 2 wikis. I’m not sure if we have a contact with the owner, but i hope we will achieve a cooperative migration toward the official wiki.
I appreciate that people are trying to be kind here, but the unofficial wiki is deliberately unresponsive and has been since before the new wiki’s creation.
The new wiki was created in response to growing concerns about its technical security, alongside existing social problems.
The complete reason page seems to be gone, but my understanding is that the original wiki’s domain owner appeared to be convinced that wikis should be “owned by the people” from an “anarchist” worldview, and that the domain therefore must never be owned by the NixOS foundation. Which would have been kind of fine, if the instance had been maintained and moderated reasonably, but that wasn’t the case, and the rest is history.
At this point I’m certain that an amicable solution will not be found; There was radio silence even before the official “side” started “aggressions”, and the unofficial wiki literally only exists because its domain owner is opposed to the concept of an official wiki. There is no common ground to be found here.
I agree with @NobbZ that blanket copying was in poor taste, but in spite of my aversion to being “mean” here, it might be worth it to just start the legal pursuit at this point.
Of course a final attempt at an amicable solution would be more than appropriate, likely even recommended from a legal perspective, but something must be done and the acquisition of the trademark seems like a good reason to force the situation to an end.
Hardly anyone goes to the wiki through the homepage. Most just end up on random article pages through web search where they don’t see that it’s an unofficial wiki.
But tbh I don’t think that the official wiki is soo much better than the unofficial one or that a community distro should crack down on unofficial documentation efforts.
It’s not, but the split means that the documentation efforts remain even more unfocused than they already are. It’d be nice if we could just coalesce on one wiki. Besides, the concerns with outdated software, bus factor of 1 and moderation issues remain.
Shutting down wiki.nixos.org rather than asking for the shutdown of nixos.wiki is an option that isn’t discussed much. I don’t think a wiki is a great way for sharing knowledge about NixOS anyway.
Using NixOS is more like using a SDK so the instruction format that is well suited for other distros doesn’t translate well for many topics. When I’m dilligently working on other distros I naturally end up writing protocols that are similar in form (perhaps not in quality) to the Archlinux or Ubuntu Wiki. With NixOS I have my nix configs, I have my git messages, and maybe some notes containing weird hyper specific details or a rough overview for the deployment.
Reference documentation and Q&A/forum are just better forms for sharing knowledge about NixOS.
Anyway to tie this back to the topic. I hope the trademark isn’t used to crush well intentioned community efforts.
