Software Freedom & Trademarks: Examining Rust's New Policy through the Lens of FOSS History
sfconservancy.org
When it comes to the law, people working on software freedom are often most concerned about copyright and contract law (and the licenses we use under both), since these appear to most directly affect software freedom. How people can use, study, modify, and redistribute the software is naturally of paramount importance and these laws heavily affect those rights. Generally FOSS projects don't consider their brand as much as the software and community being built, and so other fields of law, like trademark, get less consideration.
  • thingsiplay@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    @polskilumalo I like the language, but these policies made me nervous, so I started learning alternative languages. What makes me most nervous is, how Rust will play out in Linux in the future. This is very important, because Rust is the first language allowed side by side with C in Linux Kernel code. I really hope the Linux team won’t kick out Rust from the Kernel because of some trademarks policy concerns! That’s my biggest fear at the moment.

    • Łumało [he/him]@lemmygrad.mlOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think this will outright “kill” rust. Just as the article says, a similar situation existed in the past with mozilla. That’s how IceDove, IceWeasel and IceCat were born.

      I think a similar situation could come up with Rust being rebranded as Crab or something. But I think it might not come to this, as Kernel devs will be influential in steering the direction the Rust foundation takes, in molding the trademark policy.