Why the Rust Trademark Policy was such a problem
Edit: This whole thread went to hell. There's like 2-3 people that are really vested about this situation and have made posts, and articles elsewhere that make their viewpoints seem bigger. Also the biggest comment thread is about a gun rights tangent. GG.
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In some ways this is a good thing - organizations should take steps to develop better brand credibility. Sometimes I just want to know if something is an official package/event/documentation/account/etc. I want to be able to go to a blog post, see an image and know that's an official Rust affiliated account without having to memorize names or read about someone's profile history.
The panic about people being afraid of being sued for just mentioning rust seems farfetched. The policy outlines some pretty liberal fair-use, and would probably only take legal action in extreme cases.
Of course, I doubt this is going to go over well. I doubt people will take the time to understand how to use the trademarks correctly and it'll lead to a situation where nobody follows it so the whole excercise in credibility will be pointless.
As a business owner, the Rust Trademark Policy is a bigger problem than this post says.
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable using any Rust in my business's software if this goes through.
I mean, when they go so far as to say that the GCC frontend is not a Rust compiler, but "GCC compiler for Rust," and you can't even give stuff away for free, it becomes a minefield for any company.
More ranty details about my misgivings are at [1].
Many of things there were reading either as distractions from something larger or looked like extreme power tripping.
Telling example to me was no firearms policy on conferences or you’re having copyright infringement or no rust in package name
I don't think the "this is power-tripping" model of what's going on is very likely.
The "this is what you get if you ask lawyers for a trademark policy and don't pay enough attention to what you get back" model seems closer.
This post by a former nodejs decision-maker provides some evidence for that:
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/12lb0am/can_someone_e...
Anyone have a link to whatever this post is talking about? I can't find one in the article and don't pay enough attention to rust to already know the context
Might be this https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1ErZlwz9bbSI43dNo-rgQ...
I have half a mind to start a framework and throw a conference all about using Rust to write the firmwares to intelligent extra-safe guns that refuse to fire without biometric and other extra super safety measures like distance from a registered bluetooth or wifi device, gps location, remote disable by police, etc.
Surely the Rust Foundation doesn't insist that guns be hackable and error prone by being written in java or c or anything but the most reliable language available?
(I don't own any guns, and if I did I would want it to be as dumb as a hammer not something controlled by software, so I'm neither gun-nut nor gun-control-nut, and this post is only serious about the point not the hypothetical used to illustrate the point.)
Please excuse the unrelated question...I have seen this theme multiple times in the last couple of months, and believe it is open source. Does anyone if this is the case, and where to find it? Couldn't find a mention on the site itself
Very insightful.
I think the trademark policy is further complicated by the fact Rustâ„¢ (is that how we're supposed to do it?) only has one functionally complete implementation. This is another disaster in the making, and the community is collectively putting their head in the sand. [1][2]
The problem of their intentions, and the character of the authors and approvers, is not at all solved by "they asked for comment and recieved comment"
The problem is just what kinds of outlandish things they thought it was within their right to control. They still think that even after "recieving comment", and that is a problem.
feels like an HOA...people who have never had any real power in their lives (but feel they really should), so they go completely overboard and impose ridiculously arbitrary impositions when given any small amount of oversight
btw, if there is a Rust conference in certain states and you don't have the proper legal signage posted wrt firearms (and I mean the hosting facility, not the conference itself), people will carry and you can't stop them
After reading for a bit I'm totally lost. I'm what sense does this "foundation" own the programming language rust and/or wield control over it?
Specifically if the toolchain developers and users sent the foundation email to spam and moved on with their lives as if this group didn't exist, does anything change?
Found this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582766 which helped a little
So we have given it enough time [0] to see where the Rust Foundation is going and it turns out that I was wrong. It doesn't look good so far and there is a reason why I said the trademarks part was 'Very important'.
The foundation is slowly consuming itself into a Linux Foundation like corporate organization that is in the interests of Big Tech companies and not the community. I had these suspicions before [1] about the way it was organized, but ignored it.
Now this draconian trademark policy is strike 3 and is already putting off those supporting the organization. Before that, it was them setting up as a 501(c)6 like the Linux Foundation and afterwards then have board seats for sale for Big Tech companies as many have pointed out [2].
It just seems that this 'foundation' has become another scam.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199702