I started watching [3]. I have no stakes in this, but a lot of stuff I should be enraged about... I'm just not? Doesn't look fundamentally different to Debian or Firefox trademark policies.
I guess it is an abrupt change in trademark enforcement for Rust.
Just ignoring that it is fundamentally gross and pointless, which some people don't understand somehow, consider the practical implications. I can't casually make a youtube video or blog article teaching about Rust without worrying about trademarks if I use the word. Hundreds of rust libraries have Rust in the name and would be in violation of this policy the second it changed, etc.
IANAL but it's important to understand what is and isn't enforceable regarding a trademark. I can write about Debian, Firefox and Rust without an explicit disclaimer that I'm not endorsed by their corresponding foundations if it's obvious in context. I can also write about Coca-Cola, Nintendo and Oracle in a similar manner. It doesn't matter what any of the trademark policies say.
I wouldn't worry about writing on rust, the language. It certainly sucks that the language, the compiler and the foundation share the same name. But it probably sucks for the foundation as well regarding enforcement.
I don't get why people like to put the name "rust" in crate names, unless they write tools that work with the language (linters, auto-formatters), it just feels redundant.
> I don't get why people like to put the name "rust" in crate names, unless they write tools that work with the language (linters, auto-formatters), it just feels redundant.
In crate names it is redundant. As a project or domain name it isn't.
It feels redundant when you search for it on crates.io/lib.rs, it's not redundant when you search for it or talk about it anywhere else (Google, Twitter, GitHub, real life, events, conferences).
The difference is that the R-word foundation goes above and beyond their (reasonable) interests of protecting their brand/identity. This is not about trying to fend off people impersonating as "Official Rust..." or "Rust Foundation ..." but tries to stop you from even having the _word_ "rust" or "cargo" in your domain name.
Also there is some ideology-driven nonsense which is impossible to enforce but that does not stop them from the attempt to treat their community condescendingly like that.
From Mozilla's trademark policy:
If you want to include all or part of a Mozilla trademark in a domain name, you have to receive written permission from Mozilla. People naturally associate domain names with organizations whose names sound similar. Almost any use of a Mozilla trademark in a domain name is likely to confuse consumers, thus running afoul of the overarching requirement that any use of a Mozilla trademark be non-confusing. If you would like to build a Mozilla, Firefox Internet browser or Thunderbird e-mail client promotional site for your region, we encourage you to join an existing official localization project.
From Node Foundation's trademark policy:
You need permission to register or use a domain name that contains a Node.js mark in it. Please don’t
register a domain that looks or sounds similar to a Node.js or includes a misspelled Node.js mark as that
can confuse community users
From Debian's trademark policy:
You cannot use Debian trademarks in a domain name, with or without commercial intent.
Don't look fundamentally different? May I'm missing something but I have not seen a single tutorial or article about something Debian or Firefox that starts that with the disclaimer "This is not affiliated with the official Debian etc" Like the R** Foundation is asking to.
Let's not even mention the unreasonables of not being able to name package writen in R** as package-rust.=, somethng that no other programing language forbids as far as I'm aware of.
Go ahead and write a tutorial about Rust without a disclaimer. This is totally non-enforceable, trademarks can't limit talking about the thing. As long as it's clear that you are not representing them, it's fine, even without a disclaimer as described in their policy.
IANAL and this is not legal advise, but I wouldn't sweat about it. This same thing applies to any other trademark too, be it Debian, Firefox, Nintendo or Coca-Cola.
Yeah, it's such a weird outrage. I went and compared it to the node foundation one and its very similar. Some of the other issues he has are kind of deranged. I'm glad the Foundation want Rust meetups to be firearm free. Good Lord. Is that really worth getting so upset about?
I've got a couple small things I don't like, but once again, it seems to be right in line with other open source trademark policies. I just had never looked closely at them before
> I'm glad the Foundation want Rust meetups to be firearm free. Good Lord. Is that really worth getting so upset about?
I strongly, STRONGLY, agree with their political stance. However, I find their forcing their politics down people's throats extremely concerning. Keep in mind that you also have to seek approval to use the word Rust (I am not affiliated with the Rust Foundation), which means that they could disallow it merely because they don't like you or what you stand for (which the prior rule shows a tendency to do). Call me crazy, but I fail to see how that's in any way progressive (yes, given even the tolerance paradox) - especially given that the other people and beliefs will be running the Rust Foundation at some point in the future.
This isn't a matter of "keep your politics out of tech," it's a matter of bringing in politics being actually harmful to the community.
Ending gun violence in America is the responsibility of voters and lawmakers, not the Rust Foundation.
So a "Ferris and Firearms" meetup is simply not allowed to occur. That sounds extremely inclusive.
This also implies that organizers would have to go through the effort AND cost (because you are only allowed to collect fees for food and drinks) of doing entry control or a meetup.
Yes, but for a different reason. From the document's section on User Groups
>The main focus of the group is discussion of and education about Rust software;
It's a programming language, not a lifestyle brand. Not everything needs to be dragged down into US-centric culture wars. It's good that they don't want to dilute the brand and are keeping it focused on the software. If you want to go to the range with a group there are tons of meetups for that. I don't know why you would want to make one based around a programming language.
Amazing, you get lawyers involved and they proceed to immediately alienate a large number of people in the very community the foundation is meant to nurture. It's a pretty good example of an own-goal by the rust foundation. Fire the idiot lawyers and draft a much toned down, much restricted version of this.
For the sake of the argument, let's imagine that you fork rust. You'd have to come up with another name for it right?
But since the name it's the only thing that is getting in the way with this new (draft) policy, you wouldn't really have to fork the language and the tooling etc. All you have to do is to just use this new made up name in place of rust (and similarly for cargo) and you've achieved independence with a fraction of the cost.
E.g.
Rust -> Crust
Cargo -> Embargo
"Hey, here's a quick Crust tutorial: check out this git repo and run: embargo build"
In the last few hours, I've been thinking about how much effort would it really be to fork it, Iceweasel style, and IMO even just forking, renaming would be a pretty significant effort (if done right).
Fork the web page, you cannot just replace Rust with ALTERNATIVE, because ALTERNATIVE is not used at npm, you don't have a Discord community, and you don't have books and videos, and no foundation. All those changes would need to be kept up-to-date.
You could also have a new file type, .altrs, while you still want to be able to use Rust's files. Same goes for tooling, supporting websites such as crates.io: you might want your own, but you also want all the tools to work with the Rust crates. With the new file type, you need people to know how to change their config to treat .altrs files as regular .rs files.
.. though I don't know how much of it would be really necessary if all you want is to not violate their new policy, so it's more of a thought experiment at this point.
Even that point is ridiculous. Ferris was released from the original author as "public domain" property. It is not a "gift" or "compromise" of the foundation, they would not be able to restrict Ferris' usage, even if they wanted to (and after reviewing their document, I am 100% they would love to)
Yes, and you are doing so on a post about a random project written in Rust, which doesn't have anything to do with the policy proposal that just happens to be under review during the same time.
This just diverts attention away from the original project that was posted here.
Are you going to post the same thing under every project written in Rust during the next weeks?
Sure. They provide a form for that, and there are discussion threads in many places. Commenting vitriol on random projects that are, in fact, totally unrelated to the Rust Foundation is not productive.
I'm sorry if you took my comment as vitriol, it's not meant to be that, it was a light-hearted joke.
The proposal was very disappointing to me, and it has been on top of my mind when I browsed HN this morning, so when I saw a cool project that -- if some of the sections of the proposal go through -- would violate Rust's Trademark Policy, I thought it'd be acceptable to bring that up (and still think that).
I believe raising awareness to issues with the proposal is productive, and hopefully at least some people here on HN decided to leave feedback in the Rust Foundation's form, so that as little of the non-sensical paragraphs stay in the final document as possible.
I expect them to change things, too: they will remove 1 or 2 of the most egregious stuff and will leave in the rest, and then celebrating that they listen to the community. I hope I'm wrong, but moves like this really irk me and they shutter the built-up trust immediately.
Sanctioned by the foundation. According to the February 2023 Rust Foundation Board meeting notes (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/static/minutes/2023-02-14-m..., Paragraph 7.), the board reviewed and believes this is fine, this has been in discussions for months.
It is based on the results of a previous survey: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/wkv8gv/rust_foundatio.... Looking at where we are now it's safe to assume that not all community feedback was given the same level of care, the (vocal) community is against this, as am I.
