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Comment by napworth | Hacker News Reader

It’s both cool and confusing that Github is posting git release notes.

It is completely to GitHub’s benefit to blur the lines between Git and GitHub. Many newer devs don’t even realize there’s a difference.

That was me years ago.

I feel like Git let its brand get used by others and now that's that. Kind of illustrates why companies defend their trademarks so vigorously.

The full story of Git* trademarks is here: [0]

TL;DR: GitHub applied for a US trademark 5 years before the Git project did, so the initial application from the Git project was denied as confusingly similar to GitHub. Rather than litigate who got to use what, the parties came to an agreement to continue using the marks in parallel as they had been doing, which allowed the Git project to be granted a US trademark. The Git project also grandfathered in others who had been operating in good faith like GitLab.

[0] https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

This feels overly cynical. GitHub is a major Git contributor, as is their parent company Microsoft, both supporting use cases that either directly or indirectly benefit their users. And in GitHub’s case, their product is tightly coupled to Git. Why shouldn’t they want to highlight changes that may be useful to the readers of their engineering blog?

They posted a blog about it. First sentence

"The open source Git project just released Git 2.31 with features and bug fixes from 85 contributors, 23 of them new"

With a link to the lore.kernel.org mailing list archive

Reply on news.ycombinator.com