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Comment by ChrisSD | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit hyperbolic but there is an underlying issue here. The Rust project wants to keep control of the Rust name. They're more than happy for, e.g. Debian to fork it for inclusion into their repositories or for other forks to exist.

However, if a company creates a hard fork of Rust but still insists on calling it Rust, they want the ability to say "don't use our name".

The problem is, what's the best license to express that intent? Reusing the Firefox one makes sense in some ways (it's been well studied) but perhaps Rust would benefit from a custom license?

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IMNAL but...

Rust the name is a trademark and the software licenses deal with copyright. Someone can hard fork under a different name and the copyright carries but the trademark wouldn't. Plus, this isn't an EULA where more info is conveyed.

Not sure there is a clean way to fit multiple separate things into a copyright policy and maybe IP grant. Trademark law works a little different, right?

This was my understanding on how these things worked as well. But again, not a lawyer.

In Kubernetes-land, the code is all standard Apache 2 but the trademark is governed by a custom set of policies the community decided on.

For example, companies must pass the conformance program before they can use the name in marketing.

Wouldn't the zlib licence fit here?

> 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.

Possibly calling both the compiler implementation and the language Rust is the issue here.

The compiler implementation is rustc.

There's a reasonably complete alternative (it compiles most code but doesn't enforce borrow checker rules so is more permissive than rustc) called mrustc.

The project and language are called Rust. The compiler is rustc. You could make an alternative compiler under a different name than rust or rustc with this trademark restriction.

Cpython and Python are similar here.

> You could make an alternative compiler under a different name than rust or rustc with this trademark restriction

But would you be allowed to call it a Rust compiler, even if it compiled a slightly modified version of the Rust language ?

There are many C/C++ compilers, often they have some compiler-specific extensions, but they still call themselves C/C++ compilers. Would a similar situation be possible for Rust with the current license?

Why not? I think that wouldn't infringe trademark. IANAL

IANAL, but precedent says you can use "for Rust" in your description without issue. Though the Rust trademark could still be used to request a removal of association if you were doing something untoward in the eyes of the rust project.

So it's not necessarily an unchecked freedom but it's also not limiting in most cases either.

> But would you be allowed to call it a Rust compiler, even if it compiled a slightly modified version of the Rust language ?

AFAIK Rust is not specified by a fixed standard. Thus, it would be hard if not practically impossible to comply with a definition of what Rust is if none was ever done.

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