Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes. The foundation, which provides financial and legal support for the memory-safe programming language, had proposed fresh rules on the use of the word Rust and its logo, which included the recommendation that …
The language name is not trademarked, it's just the name of a standard. The USPTO says that C++ was the trademark for a fertilizer but then it was abandoned, other than that there's no other trademark for "C++".
The C++ logo and the "Standard C++ Foundation" name are trademarked but permission is given to use them, and the terms of use you linked to seem sensible. The C++ foundation have managed to not shoot themselves in the foot, which is odd because C++ is good at letting people do that and Rust is supposed to be safer.
That is essentially the problem in a nutshell.
A trademark has to have a relatively narrow field of application so that it's clearly associated with the business of the trademark owner. Hence there wasn't a problem with Apple computers and Apple records until Apple computers started to emit recorded music. As as soon as there is likely to be confusion in the public mind as to which business the trademark represents (or the trademark becomes generic, e.g. Hoover), it loses its legal status so trademark owners have to be clear in their marketing and active in defence of their intellectual property.
The problem the Rust people have is that there's no point in having a trademark if it's unclear what it represents or it's spread so thinly it's effectively indefensible. If the Rust "community" want to use the word "Rust" in pretty much any way they choose then it's pretty much by definition not a trademark in law.
Which does rather raise the question of why they (the foundation) want a trademark in the first place - in many ways it would be better for them (the "community") if the word became generic as soon as possible. But that's a common problem in Open Source: there's "they" and there's "them"...
They seem to want a trademark so that they can enforce conformance to their specification and deny use to unauthorized variants. But language variation happens all the time naturally, both in human-speak (natural language) and in computer languages. Witness the many changes to the once-simple BASIC language that Kemeny invented ca. 1964 and whose name lives on in the very different Visual Basic. They'd be better off simply saying that a program can only call itself compliant with, say, "Official Rust 23.2", and make that a trademark that users may choose to refer to.
"Not all open source projects have retained that right."
That's the essence of open source. If it gets things wrong it's possible for a sufficiently knowledgeable and committed members of the community to fix it. In practice that can be the majority of the developers, e.g. Openoffice->LibreOffice.
The comments from the Rust Foundation all sound like they came from the mouths of politicians. Lost of "sorry, not sorry" comments and "oh, we've been misunderstood" and "it was not our intention to...", blah, blah, blah.
Even the comments about going back and re-thinking things in light of the comments sounds like it's direct from the politicians play-book. Announce something you know people won't like, but do it in it's most extreme form, then claim to "listen to the stake holders" and tone it down to what you originally planned anyway and the "victims" take it on with relief because now it's less bad than the original announcement.
It's entirely possible they really do mean what they say, but if so, they need to take a step back and "listen" to their own comments and compare with the comments of sleazy politicians.
I have little to no interest in Rust or the foundation and am just looking on this as a spectator so have no real axe to grind from either side of this conflict.
Based on the article, maybe the real question ought to be why has there been such a major shift in the governance team and why are there none left with good community relationships? Has there been a coup?
Yes, indeed, a good question. From the article
"Williams added that there's been significant upheaval in Rust's governance over the past year, which has led to the absence of insiders with experience dealing with the Rust community."
Why was it not a concern when long-term project builders were shoved out and replaced by squatters? Parasites are very much attracted to healthy bodies, but the health declines strangely thereafter.
The Rust community is extremely political. As an example, the new trademark policy says that a conference using the word Rust must have a code of conduct and must also prohibit carrying of firearms.
I'm a normal European white male who doesn't own firearms, who votes for same sex marriage, believes in global warming and who was first in line for the Covid shots... in other words, a liberal person. I hate how they spend a lot of time talking about social change instead of bits and bytes.
The entire R**t community is ran by well-to-do, naive 1st worlders. The jargon on how their mascot is sexless should be a heads up to anyone thinking about contributing anything. How many go on about and draw attention to the sex of their mascot? What do I give a damn about the sex of theirs or any mascot? There's some seriously detached goofballs over there.
R**t because I don't want to be sued by R**t for using R**t without permission.
Since Ferris the UNOFFICIAL rust mascot, and isn't designed or owned by the Rust project or foundation, its creator can do anything they want with it (even state that Ferris is agender, which is not the same as "sexless"). This was probably done to prevent people from debating whether Ferris is male or female, which is not a productive discussion.
"listen to the stake holders"
Sage advice for a vampire confronted by an angry mob but being impaled also works for the rest of us ;)
Your take on it does make it sound like a script from some UK Whitehall satire.
Only recently discovered it was named after the fungal disease of plants - could be worse - smut or bunt. Iron oxide is a bit common so a rust fork might go upmarket with 'patina.'
I will be interested to see whether Rust and/or Go survive in the longer term - seems odd to think we might be writing code in C in the 2040s but stranger things are known.
Conversely, it’s hard to blame the politicians for that. It's been observed that people demanding public apologies aren’t actually interested in forgiveness or whether what the person says is actually true.
The evidence suggests that when a prominent figure apologizes for a controversial statement, individuals are either unaffected or become more likely to desire that the individual be punished
> The comments from the Rust Foundation all sound like they came from the mouths of politicians. Lost of "sorry, not sorry" comments and "oh, we've been misunderstood" and "it was not our intention to...", blah, blah, blah.
Fungus or corrosion, neither are appealing things to have named it after. Seems the rot has spread to the management as well.
I once said of the Chairman of a well known industry body, who had been very successful at building consensus, that he mistook his ability at ekeing out consensus as leadership and thus fell flat on his face when he tried to lead that body into a new, more commercial, form by presenting a new constitution as a fait accompli to be voted on. He was voted out of his post, and thus his full time job, on the very day he presented the new constitution.
I suspect something similar has gone on here. Someone presented the new policy in such a way as it looked very much like a fait accompli, when they should have tried their proposals out on selected individuals and groups as "talking points" and only once some consensus emerged as to what would be an acceptable new policy, only then should they have published a draft of that consensus for public review.
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