gnome-mastermind trademark question

[Miriam Ruiz]

2008/12/1 Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist at gmail.com>:

> Upstream dislikes the name, but if it's not creating more than an hour
> of work on their side, the basic question behind this is quite interesting.

In the search for alternative games:


Mastermind [1] or Master Mind is a simple code-breaking board game for
two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by
Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications
expert, but the game resembles an earlier pencil and paper game called
bulls and cows [2] that may date back a century or more.

Exactly the same game is also sold with other names, at least "Secret
Code" by the Danish company Top-Toy As, possibly to circumvent the
trademark of the original name.

Mastermind is similar to moo, a computer program written in the late
1960s by J. M. Grochow at MIT in the PL/I computer language for the
Multics operating system. It, in turn, is similar to a game called
Bulls and Cows that may date back a century or more.

Bulls and Cows, known also as Cows and Bulls or Pigs and Bulls is an
old code-breaking paper and pencil game for two players, similar to
Mastermind.


The name is indeed trademarked.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_cows


gnome-moo sounds cool ;)

Greetings,
Miry