• A trademark dispute over the HDL “nmigen” has split the ecosystem: M-Labs holds the US trademark and has licensed Libre-SOC as the “Authorized Maintainer,” while the original maintainer whitequark continues to host the old GitHub repo and promotes the fork “amaranth,” creating legal and branding confusion.

• Libre-SOC’s 150 k-line nmigen code-base is frozen on the trademark-licensed GitLab mirror (https://gitlab.com/nmigen/nmigen) because migrating to the amaranth fork would jeopardize the trademark license and the project’s ability to raise ~USD 40 M in venture capital.

• The debate centers on whether scrubbing git commit history to remove the word “nmigen” is required to avoid trademark infringement; lkcl argues it is necessary, while others contend that commit metadata is not user-facing and that such scrubbing destroys provenance.

• Participants cite precedents such as Mozilla/Firefox vs. Debian “Iceweasel,” the Python Software Foundation’s trademark, and IBM’s Linux-kernel copyright audit to illustrate how large OSS projects handle branding and legal due-diligence.

• Practical development impact includes Libre-SOC having to use “git format-patch” and “git am” instead of normal merges because an earlier history rewrite broke normal git workflows, adding friction to integrating upstream fixes.

• nmz787 and lsneff suggest simply forking amaranth and renaming it, but lkcl estimates ~EUR 300 k and 3+ years to refactor all imports, documentation, and user-facing strings across the entire Libre-SOC ecosystem.

• The discussion highlights the tension between open-source ideals (freedom to fork and rename) and trademark realities when significant investment and large code-bases are involved.

• Halo 2 zero-knowledge proof system is introduced via Electric Coin’s blog post, along with Circom (a domain-specific language for writing arithmetic circuits) and its Circomlib circuit library, including a SHA-256 implementation whose line 31 in main.circom is flagged as confusing.

• A concise evolutionary pathway for eyes is outlined: light-blocking pit → pinhole camera → transparent lens precursor → solid lens, with differentiation into fovea and retina, while pit vipers retain primitive heat-sensing pits.

• Drosophila genetics is suggested as a tractable system to re-evolve ancestral eye stages by knocking out specific developmental genes, prompting interest in symbiotic or organoid-injection models as alternatives to simple mutation.