Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

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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.

It seems unnecessarily heavy-handed to me.

Back in the day the Ada people had a reputation for being very "controlling", but they didn't stop the Gnat people naming their company "Ada Core Technologies", and they didn't stop the adahome.com people using that domain name or writing "Ada Home: The Web Site for Ada" in big letters on top of their webpage.

I don't think that caused any serious problems.

> I don't think that caused any serious problems.

It's certainly a different approach - that's the big problem, people aren't used to this kind of approach.

I just watched a video where someone, in response to the policy of not having 'rust' in a crate name, brought up how npm allows 'node', and golang allows 'go' in their package names. And those were mistakes, way more for npm, which they eventually kind of fixed with namespaces. And cargo is not getting namespaces, in fact the whole package system is pretty but that's a separate thing.

My bet is that this whole is going to be a disaster, but maybe this is a baby step for more professionalism for future projects to learn from - even if it's about what not to do.

> Also the biggest comment thread is about a gun rights tangent. GG.

This is because the Rust trademark policy mentions firearms for some reason. Some people who are used to the Linux trademark policy find this bizarre and off-putting.

> the Rust trademark policy mentions firearms for some reason.

I read that bit! I can explain it to you!

Yes, the Rust trademark policy _draft_ mentions firearms once. It's because they won't endorse an event that allows attendees to carry firearms.

And what does a trademark policy have to do with guns? Draft or not, it’s an unnecessary insertion of politics.

They essentially turned their supposed trademark policy into a code of conduct, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

> what does a trademark policy have to do with guns?

In the case of this particular trademark policy, it's because they won't endorse an event that allows attendees to carry firearms. They consider the use/display of their marks in a way that suggests they endorsed an event when they did not to be an infringement of their trademark. They provide a basic set of conditions that should be met "at minimum" in order for them to endorse an event and grant the use of the marks. One of those conditions is that the event prohibits the carrying of firearms by attendees.

Except Rust is a language much larger than the foundation. They don't control who uses the Rust language and their attempts to control who can talk about Rust are just their attempts to do something they shouldn't.

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