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“What’s In A Name”
Last year Cypress-the-company cut off sorry-cypress and a few other plugins that competed with the company’s own dashboard. The reason stated was that names like “sorry-cypress”, “cy2”, and “cypress-debugger” were infringing on the company’s trademark. They called it “brand misappropriation”. Let’s take a look at the “Cypress” US trademark. From https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results we can search for “Cypress” under the testing products (plus a few filters to remove thousands of other matches, this is a ubiquitous word).
We get to the full info page if we click on the first tile.
We can see the description of services covered by the trademark: seems like both downloadable test runner and non-downloadable SaaS are covered.
Nice. The test runner has been in use since 2015, and the Dashboard since 2017. Let’s look at when the trademark was filed and registered.
I am not a lawyer, but I do find it curious that the trademark application was only filed in April of 2023. Does it make the point raised by the “sorry-cypress” in 2021 a little moot?
The Timing Question
Why would Cypress-the-company cut off 3rd-party services at the end of 2023? Here is a curious finding. Just poking around in the section below, I found another interesting document. Under “Assignment Abstract Of Title Information” you can find PDF titled assignment-tm-8197-0539.pdf
If you read the assignment doc, you will find that on Sept 13, 2023, if I understand it correctly (I am not a lawyer, I just saw one on TV) Comerica Bank extended a loan guarantee to Cypress-the-company guaranteed by the trademark IP.
It seems to me that assigning a trademark in exchange for a loan really forces one to start enforcing it. Good for all parties involved.
So… if this is a trademark “brand misappropriation”, will Cypress-the-company unblock the offending plugins if they change their names to something like “e2e-debugger” and “e2e-tracer”?
How Is It Going?
The response to banning 3rd-party plugins was mixed. I wondered how Cypress Test Runner implements the ban. Is there some non-open-source code injected into the binary I run on CI? Unfortunately, my question remains unanswered.
Filip Hric asked what the people affected by “sorry-cypress” block are doing now.
According to this small poll, 14% moved to Cypress Cloud. For a company, the short-term 10-20% bump in clients might be worth it. One could also argue that people who set up their own reporter would be ripe for converting to paid Cypress Cloud later. So that’s a 30% success rate, possibly. Personally, I would be pretty worried that I just pushed 60% of the polled users towards Playwright, but that’s just me.
Shameless plug: I have 50 lessons in my Cypress vs Playwright course if you want to see for yourself how each test runner solves the same hands-on exercises.
New Videos
Ok, I have been recording some sweet videos to go with my Cypress examples and recipes.
All the above videos have a 100% “thumbs up” rating. Well, except for one, sigh.
It is ok, I promise to try harder next time.
Before I forget
Read my blog posts Do Not Put Ids Into Test Ids and How To Learn Cypress.io Test Runner In 2024.