Rust Foundation Apologizes For Proposed Trademark Changes, Promises Improvement (theregister.com) 37
"The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes," reports the Register.
The Foundation now says their proposed policy "clearly needs improvement" and "there are many valid critiques of the initial draft," promising to address them and adopt a more transparent process (with a report summarizing the feedback soon). From the Register's report: 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 people not use 'Rust' in their Rust crate names, eg: vulture-rs would be preferred over vulture-rust. These draft changes triggered a backlash... Over the weekend, Rust creator Graydon Hoare voiced support for the community's objections in a Reddit discussion thread, in response to a post by programmer Andrew Gallant, a former member of the Rust moderation team, who argued the new policy was not all that different from the old one.
"Open them up side by side — old and new — and look at what they each say about, specifically, package names, project names, repos or websites using the word 'rust', or modified versions of the logo used for small groups or projects," wrote Hoare. "These are specifically the things people are upset about, because they all changed from 'acceptable' to 'prohibited' when 'clarifying' the policy. And those are specifically things that everyone in the community does, and has done, for years. There are zillions of packages, projects, repos, websites and groups using the names and logo this way, as the old policy said they could. The new policy tells them all to stop."
Long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens told the Register that Rust's trademark policy "goes far awry of fair use which is legally permitted. Books on Rust will always have its name in their title, commercial products will be advertised as being written in Rust, being compatible with Rust, or compiling Rust. But the policy attempts to deny permission for these things. A proper trademark policy prevents others from representing that their product is Rust or is endorsed by the trademark holder of Rust. That's really as much as you can ever enforce, so there's no sense in a policy that asks for more."
The Register also spoke to Ashley Williams, a former member of the Rust core team and the original executive director and founder of the Rust Foundation, who argued upheaval in Rust's governance over the past year led to a team with less experience dealing with the Rust community. "I think a couple of very passionate people participated in the trademark working group and they didn't involve a lot of people who have even basic experience interacting with the community. So really classic community behaviors ended up getting prohibited in that [draft] policy. And that's really why everybody got upset. The policy ultimately said, 'a thing that you do all the time as a way of contributing to the Rust community is now against our policy.'"
The Foundation now says their proposed policy "clearly needs improvement" and "there are many valid critiques of the initial draft," promising to address them and adopt a more transparent process (with a report summarizing the feedback soon). From the Register's report: 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 people not use 'Rust' in their Rust crate names, eg: vulture-rs would be preferred over vulture-rust. These draft changes triggered a backlash... Over the weekend, Rust creator Graydon Hoare voiced support for the community's objections in a Reddit discussion thread, in response to a post by programmer Andrew Gallant, a former member of the Rust moderation team, who argued the new policy was not all that different from the old one.
"Open them up side by side — old and new — and look at what they each say about, specifically, package names, project names, repos or websites using the word 'rust', or modified versions of the logo used for small groups or projects," wrote Hoare. "These are specifically the things people are upset about, because they all changed from 'acceptable' to 'prohibited' when 'clarifying' the policy. And those are specifically things that everyone in the community does, and has done, for years. There are zillions of packages, projects, repos, websites and groups using the names and logo this way, as the old policy said they could. The new policy tells them all to stop."
Long-time open source advocate Bruce Perens told the Register that Rust's trademark policy "goes far awry of fair use which is legally permitted. Books on Rust will always have its name in their title, commercial products will be advertised as being written in Rust, being compatible with Rust, or compiling Rust. But the policy attempts to deny permission for these things. A proper trademark policy prevents others from representing that their product is Rust or is endorsed by the trademark holder of Rust. That's really as much as you can ever enforce, so there's no sense in a policy that asks for more."
The Register also spoke to Ashley Williams, a former member of the Rust core team and the original executive director and founder of the Rust Foundation, who argued upheaval in Rust's governance over the past year led to a team with less experience dealing with the Rust community. "I think a couple of very passionate people participated in the trademark working group and they didn't involve a lot of people who have even basic experience interacting with the community. So really classic community behaviors ended up getting prohibited in that [draft] policy. And that's really why everybody got upset. The policy ultimately said, 'a thing that you do all the time as a way of contributing to the Rust community is now against our policy.'"
Backtrack, make nice, try again later (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys are made out of over-reach. It's visible everywhere. No way it'll never happen again. Differently maybe, but it'll happen.
Re:Backtrack, make nice, try again later (Score:4)
Very much this.
I think a couple of very passionate people participated in the trademark working group and they didn't involve a lot of people who have even basic experience interacting with the community.
That's not just the trademark working group. It's the definitive Rust experience.
Re:Backtrack, make nice, try again later (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Also "passion"is no valid replacement for "skill" and "insight", including the insight that you need to respect a community if you want to work with it. Imposing rules does not make people conform to your wishes. It just makes them angry, at least the ones that have actual skill.
So the amateurs have taken over? (Score:3)
Yeah, figured that. They will kill this thing eventually, because they are obviously authoritarian assholes.
Maybe Rust would have had some merit as a language (or maybe not). But the politics surrounding it are a massive read flag and a clear "stay away".
Re: So the amateurs have taken over? (Score:3)
because they are obviously authoritarian assholes
It's not like they told us how to arrange our white space.
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Nerdling triggered by silly internet name.
Thank you for giving me someone to laugh at today.
Re: So the amateurs have taken over? (Score:1)
Aspies dont get irony. They're very literal.
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Well, then change the color-scheme. Easy to do in any decent terminal.
But I guess anybody going into hysterics when indentation is used for block definition cannot do that either.
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Being serious for a moment, I'm not a fan of space indentation syntax to create blocks but I never went batshit about it.
I come from a C background. I love my curly braces. They just feel good because that's where I started and they're very comfortable.
That being said, I understand the space indentation philosophy. It just doesn't work for me because most of the code I write is throw away one off crap and doesn't need to look good, be maintainable, etc. so I wouldn't really get the proposed benefits this
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1-Being required to have an opening curly bracket.
That one looks like a sideways mustache and that just creeps me out.
But the closing curly bracket looks like a sideways happy face, I want lots of that in my code.
2-Having to use the exclamation point for negation.
It's SO negative.
Instead of a friendly symbol that says "hey it's ok whatever value you want to be, but if
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Fascist.
(*) With my current settings. (**)
(**) (*) Was not meant to look like an anus.
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Yep, that nicely sums it up.
In other news, people that go into hysterics over _details_ of a language syntax are not coders at all. They do not even qualify as adult.
Now, if we were talking Brainfuck or Cobol here, there would be some merit to the criticism, but anything else? Grow up!
Forums that mangle whitespace (Score:2)
Languages with significant leading whitespace are harder to discuss in a discussion platform that mangles whitespace. I've seen forums where posts use HTML's default behavior of collapsing whitespace into a single space, possibly augmented with a second rule of collapsing whitespace containing a newline into a newline. Slashdot is one of them. In the case of languages with braces, each user can restore the indentation of a code fragment by running GNU indent, clang-format, etc. In the case of Python, block
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Monetize it in the future? So even more red flags and more reason to stay away. Lawyers and engineering do not mix.
Rust in crate names (Score:2)
Besides the trademark aspect, why would you put "rust" in your crate name? If you are making a rust crate, it is obviously rust, there is no need to put "rust" in the name. The exception would be for crates that are part of the core, and as such, the Rust foundation stance of keeping the name "rust" for themselves make sense.
For example, few libraries with C bindings, or written in C have "c" in their name, the most notable exception is, of course, libc, because it is part of the language.
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It's common practice to name a library package with a combination of the implementation language name and the name of the problem the library addresses. That way it's easy to search in package managers or elsewhere for what you need: a library in the language you're using that solves a problem you have.
For example, a large number of Python libraries are named with a "py" prefix. Similarly, huge numbers of Go modules in github start with "go".
Few C libraries do this probably because C is often assumed to be
sigh... I remember this from Ada (Score:2)
US Government trademarked "Ada" back in the early 1980s and then had to backtrack from the idea when the trademark rules didn't meet their needs. Yet Another Instance of reinventing the wheel, because we as an industry/profession do not learn! "OK, boomer..."
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I must say, it does make me smile that the latest "C killer" that blatantly ignores legitimate criticisms is falling into all of the same pitfalls as the "C killer" of decades past fell into.
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Well, Ada emerged about the same time as C was becoming popular (the standard was approved in early 1983, about the same time that cheap PC C compilers became available.) It was never really positioned as "a C killer", but rather as "the one language to find them all and across the DoD to bind them." Now I don't recall if C was formally evaluated against the requirements document that was drafted for what was called back in 1980 "DoD 1" (that was a couple years before I got involved), but certainly with
How is rust trademarked? (Score:3)
So how exactly did they manage to trademark "rust" in the first place? It's an ancient, generic term.
Like Microsoft with Windows - they have consistently avoided ever letting their trademark be challenged in court because they know they'll lose it - except the Rust people don't have the huge legal team and deep pockets to keep things out of court.
At least as bad as the trademark is the name itself - a flaw shared by many modern languages. BASIC and C sort of had an excuse since search engines didn't exist when they were created - but these days a name is a functional object regularly used to search for documentation and other information.
Between the search headaches it creates and the fact that it all but guarantees that your trademark is worthless garbage that should never have been granted in the first place, I just don't understand why the %$#@! anyone would use a generic word as a programming language.
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This is pretty standard. The rule is, if consumers might be confused. You can have an Apple Super Store, and an Apple Computer store and an Apple carpet store. As long as they don't go out of their way to appear like they are the same company they are all fine. But if you take apple's logo and throw it on a washing machine and call it the iWasher you can be sued.
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So how exactly did they manage to trademark "rust" in the first place? It's an ancient, generic term.
It's the particular application of the name and stylisation with a particular domain. It's not like bass was invented in 1777 (or 1876).
keep playing house (Score:2)
What's with all the drama? (Score:2)
Reminds me of Gopher (Score:3)
When it had become sufficiently popular the university of Minnesota decided it would be a great time to try and monetise it just as the web started to take off. Look how well that went for them. How many of the kids have even heard of gopher servers now much less used one?
If these clowns try to keep Rust for themselves and decide how the little people can use it - even if for now it's just the name - the the little people will just give them the finger and feck off back to C++, C#, java or even Python.
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Java now requires licensing from Oracle. [google.com] They started that only back in 2019. [bing.com]
Gotta wonder what kinds of protections for Rust there will be from this sort of thing.
Rust foundation is useless (Score:1)
Coming along AFTER a thing and pretending to have all the rights to it is the ultimate in hubris.
The "Rust Foundation" is a joke nobody is laughing to.
You can trademark, patent, copyright, file as a trade secret or otherwise "propertize" whatever "intellectual property" but that doesn't mean diddly in this case.
The Rust Foundation did not invent Rust,
The Rust Foundation does not control the development of Rust
The Rust Foundation has contributed nothing to Rust that individual developers haven't done ten tim
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There's no FORTRAN foundation, no C foundation, no X86_64 foundation, no APL foundation (I could go on) nor an English foundation, Hebrew foundation, French foundation, etc.
There are actually organizations like the MLA for English, and the French take their Académie Française pretty seriously. Not arguing about what you're saying about the Rust foundations, but there is actually a flaw in the examples.
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None of the organizations listed have any control or claim to over intellectual property. You can use say "I write in French" all day long or C# or FORTRAN. The "Rust Foundation" contributes negligible value yet claims to tell people what to say?
The Rust Foundation is stupid. Their mental pain in believing they control free speech is stupid. Their pride in being stupid and doubling down on stupid (original article) is double stupid.
The world will move on. Rust, like other languages, may or may not be
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None of the organizations listed have any control or claim to over intellectual property. You can use say "I write in French" all day long or C# or FORTRAN. The "Rust Foundation" contributes negligible value yet claims to tell people what to say?
As I said, I am not supporting the Rust foundation, just pointing out that there is actually an official organization for the French language. They don't control "intellectual property" per se. They also do not technically have legal weight in their decisions in and of themselves. However, the French do legally have an official language, complete with quotas about its use for various things and the Académie is actually the legally recognized authority on what is French.
The Rust Foundation is stupid. Their mental pain in believing they control free speech is stupid. Their pride in being stupid and doubling down on stupid (original article) is double stupid.
Their belief that they can abuse