A Discussion About the Breaking of the Internet

Mike Roberts:

Kik has been around for a while and we thought that the name “kik” on Azer’s NPM package could have caused confusion. In fact, once Azer had made it clear that he wasn’t going to change the name, we decided to use a different name for an upcoming package we are going to publish to NPM. We did hope that Azer would change his mind, but we were proceeding under a different package name even when we were told we could have the name Kik.

They reached out to Azer, using extremely friendly wording in their email:

We don’t mean to be a dick about it, but it’s a registered Trademark in most countries around the world and if you actually release an open source project called kik, our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that — and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.

Yeah, I don’t take lightly to threats either.