The latest issue comment from Don Ho is lookin' fiery! I love me some open source drama...
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issue...
> Every day that website remains active, you are in further violation of the law. I cannot authorize a "week or two" of continued trademark infringement.
> Please take down the domain immediately so you can focus on your rebranding efforts without legal interference. If the site is not removed, I will have no choice but to escalate the takedown request.
I wonder if this counts as sufficient defense of the trademark according to the trademark protection laws: if one does not guard a trademark, they run the risk of losing it.
Unfortunately, if you care about trademark or just simple copyright infringement (I haven't checked what license is Notepad++ under), they might need to enlist a lawyer sooner rather than later.
Notepad++ is not registered with the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office). Searches around will turn up nothing in the U.S. database. The name is trademarked in France (via INPI, the French patent office), which is why the maintainer has been able to send cease-and-desist notices in recent cases (e.g., the unauthorized “Notepad++ for Mac” site).
In the U.S. its only covered by common-law trademark rights from long use, as there’s no federal registration.
You don't need a trademark registration to send a cease-and-desist... you can just send one.
There's clearly demand for notepad++ on Mac. Refusing to meet users where they are at with a simple port feels like squatting on a trademark. I find myself sympathetic to the Mac porter more than Don Ho.
How is he squatting the trademark when it’s actively being used? Not releasing a version for some platform doesn’t make it squatting in the slightest.
The port just can’t use the trademark. Call it something else.
That's not how any of this works. Trademarks aren't invalidated by someone not liking how you do business.
There's demand for Crystal Pepsi but you can't go make a new soft drink yourself and call it Crystal Pepsi. If you want to say you are Pepsi, you have to be the Pepsi.
What if my Crystal Pepsi is just pepsi mixed with crystals or pepsi made into a crystal? Then it's an accurate description of the product?
Pepsi does not want you corrupting their brand by mixing it with Something-Else and calling it Something-Else-Pepsi.
Accurate description is not at all what the legal issue is about.
Trademarks indicate provenance, they don't describe product characteristics.
ACKSHUALLY, abandonment is a thing with marks, that's why companies spend money to keep them in minimal use to avoid that, or, like Pepsi, lobby to create "famous" marks.
Neither "Pepsi" nor "Notepad++" are abandoned.
If he were just squatting on a trademark this would be an open and shut case under US Trademark law.
The trademark is still in active use for Notepad++ though. That’s not squatting.
Call it notemac++, tell that its a fork of notepad++.
But you can trivially easily run Notepad++ on Mac using Wine. It works flawlessly. Nobody is keeping anything from anybody.
There is clearly a demand for sports cars being sold for under $10k, so it was ok for me to steal your car and sell it cheap
"Squatting on a trademark" makes no sense. You might as well say that I'm squatting on my name because I'm not allowing other people to sign contracts for me.
You can clone someone's project without pretending to be them. They literally put his bio up. Call it something else, put your own bio up.
> They literally put his bio up.
...crediting him as the author of the original, not the mac port.
without commenting on anything to do with trademarks, in what way is that even slightly pretending to be him? why would they put another, separate bio alongside as the person doing a mac port if they were intending to masquerade as the original author?
I don’t think they are trying to masquerade as the author so much as imply a positive association or endorsement.
If the "author" of this port respected Don Ho enough to credit him in the contributors section of his project, then why didn't he respect Don Ho enough to ask first?
If the "author" of this port respected Don Ho enough to credit him in the contributors section of his project, why doesn't he respect Don Ho enough to comply with the request to take down the violations?
This conflict indicates that the respect was never there, and thus the motivation for the bio was probably credibility laundering.
He did ask first, but Don Ho did not respond.
(Which is his right and no permission to do anything)
Don writes,
> For context: I received an email from Andrey Letov on April 8, 2026, informing me that he had just ported Notepad++ to macOS, and ask for contact, without providing further info.
So no asking to use trademarks beforehand, and no asking Don if it's okay to include him on the contributor page for the violating software.
There is a demand for the functionality, no need to use the name just to push the port.
That thread (not Don Hos post, but some of the other post) is so cringe, so many people making very dramatic assertions about how they know better than everyone else. It’s borderline “Star Wars is better than Star Trek and anyone else who says otherwise is an idiot and I have to get on the web and prove it” levels of cringe.
The timing of this is very funny for me, personally. After the Claude Code Rust re-implementation, I wanted to see how far I could push 'spec-driven development' by re-implementing Notepad++ for Linux. I used four agentic loops to draft detailed from the source, implement the code, write tests to fix regressions, and compare the result with the original source. I then re-themed it and actually came out pretty well.
I initially worried that a brand new name (I went with nootpad) might misleadingly suggest the project was built from scratch rather than being a semi-clean-room re-implementation. Then, I saw that NPP was trademarked and my worries flipped the other direction; the reason I haven't yet published it was because I'm still removing all the NPP references from the source + comments in an abundance of caution, leaving a huge disclaimer/attribution in the README. I know that OSS is an opinionated place and didn't want to step on any toes.
I must say, having all of that anxiety and seeing this guy literally put Don Ho's picture on the website and say that it was being re-named "in collaboration with" Don Ho (i.e. not in response to a legal threat) made me laugh out loud.
NixPad++
But don't block on the name, you could release it under NejneobhospodařovávatelnějšíPad++ and people will download.
It'll be easy search & replace later once you settle on a name
If you make it run stable, please do publish it at earliest opportunity.
(I volunteer for testing)
I guess now is also the time to ask Don Ho if he is ok with it the way it is. I guess he says yes. He did not take issue with the source of "notepad++ for mac" but with the branding. That people think he is behind. Nootpad is distinctive enough from notepad++, if at all I would worry about microsoft taking issue.
"nootpad" is already a very dissimilar name and I wouldn't expect that to draw any ire from anyone. Trademarks aren't absolute in their breadth.
"Notepad++ For Linux" would probably piss some folks off, though. ;)
If in doubt, always ask for clarity. And then -- if/when clarity is provided -- simply proceed accordingly.
100%. I think I hadn't fully internalized the open source vs trademark ethe (TIL that's the disputed plural of ethos) in my head. I had two nightmare scenarios: the first was where people would say "you copied Notepad++ and didn't give enough attribution, you're a thief!" and the other where...what happened here happened.
I think this was just about as close as I could get to asking Don Ho directly how he would prefer a port to be handled without actually doing so. I plan on publishing it shortly after cleaning up some God objects :)
Call it Nopepad++
okay, but wouldn't the best solution be to simply release an official macOS port? nowadays it would be cheaper than paying a lawyer to write a letter haha
Good lord, why are users of free software always act so entitled towards developers they have paid not a single cent to?
Just "simply" port your native GUI application to a completely different platform and make sure everything works as intended. No biggie! At least donate a couple hundred dollars to the developer so he can afford to run a couple of Claudes before you start asking for things.
He might not have a Mac to test it on or care to code it. It’s open source, they work on what they want after all they don’t get paid. If he was donated a Mac and enough money in sure he might look into it
It's not just that, Notepad++ is built around Win32 APIs and is designed for Windows. He's got some non-portable optimizations baked in. At its core, Notepad++ is just another Scintilla wrapper (like SciTE or Textadept) but it's targeted at and optimized for Windows. There will not be a Mac or Linux port.
If you want an editor with the same core as Notepad++, but fewer batteries included and more extensibility, Textadept is worth a look.
I use Notepad++ on WINE and it works very well, doubtless it could be done on macOS too.
why though it is open source the only problem the original dev has is that they are using his name and trademark they could name it something else and it will be okay.
If they'd named it something else, it would indeed be OK. We wouldn't be here having this conversation if that were a thing that had happened.
When there are no trademark issues then there are no trademark issues to discuss.
But they haven't named it something else, so here we are talking about the trademark issues that this raises.
Surely, this is a troll reply, but it made me think about this Lord of Rings meme/quote:
i don't know, we're having this conversation because a superfan of notepad++ vibecoded his way into a macOS port. there's a lot of demand for it seemingly.
as for the other commenters, i agree that all kinds of curmudgeon behavior from open source maintainers is valid. many personalities are valid. but it doesn't mean writing legal letters is a good idea, it's winning the battle to lose the war.
But by doing that he would need to maintain more code, which is unreasonable if it isn't something he wants.
And someone using the Notepad++ brand without his consent isn't cool, as if something goes wrong, people might assume that the original Notepad++ author is behind it, tarnishing his reputation.
If he doesn't want to make a macOS version that's on him, other people can fork it and make their own versions if they want, just make it obvious it's not from the original dev.