The reason you have a trademark is to enforce rights to the name and prevent confusion. If suddenly Python 2.8 would appear it would be easily confused for offi

The reason you have a trademark is to enforce rights to the name and prevent confusion. If suddenly Python 2.8 would appear it would be easily confused for official release. If it had flaws they often would also land on the official release. That's why if you want to make a fork you're free to do so, but you need to make a different name. If it's something people desire it will be used, you can't just ride on the popularity of the name. If your fork has different name and is not popular, it means that there was not much interest in it, period. Some of successful forks: openOffice -> LibreOffice MySQL -> MariaDB ZFS -> OpenZFS