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Most interesting bit to me is this. > Using the Rust trademarks for social and small non-profit events like meetups, tutorials, and the like is allowed for eve
by jchw 2y ago
Most interesting bit to me is this.
> Using the Rust trademarks for social and small non-profit events like meetups,
tutorials, and the like is allowed for events that are free to attend. Your materials for the event must not imply that the event is officially endorsed or run by the Rust Project or Rust Foundation unless you have written permission. For commercial events (including sponsored ones), please check in with us.
It sort of reminds me of Nintendo's awkward rules for community-ran tournaments of their games (which, well, pretty much make it impossible to do sustainably.)
I see their point (someone might mistake something called e.g. "New York Rust Conference" for being official) but using trademark to enforce rules on unofficial events is an interesting maneuver that seems to me to be relatively recent.
Go's trademark policy has a similar looking rule:
> The Go word mark may be used referentially in events, community groups, or other gatherings related to the programming language, but it may not be used in a manner that implies official status or endorsement.
At this point, it sounds more permissive: seems like it blanket allows uses to just refer to it if it's clear that it's not official.
> [...] Events and community groups may be subject to the Go programming language’s Code of Conduct, and violations of the Code of Conduct may be deemed incompatible with use of the Go Trademarks.
But then there's this, which seems to imply that your ability to use the Go trademark in reference to Go in a way that doesn't make your event sound official still obligates you to adhere to their Code of Conduct when conducting your event.
So it seems like this is a new part of the metagame.
I've not paid attention to policies like these. Could someone with more experience help me understand the context here? Specifically:
- Is this a new tactic, at least in terms of open source communities? It seems like it to me. In ~2010 it felt like open source was more fork-happy, ad-hoc and less governance-oriented, but now every other project has corporate backing, multiple committees, Code of Conducts, etc. Is the use of trademark and brand rules to exercise some control over the ecosystem new? Did someone pioneer it?
- Also, is there an inspiration for this tactic? e.g. is it inspired by a specific incident or state of affairs? Have these rules actually ever been used to do anything?
I'm guessing the real answer is that they just don't want to explicitly give up the ability to exercise these rules, but I'm not sure and I don't know how to look.
Either way, it's interesting to see committees and foundations going for these sorts of power grabs. It doesn't look like this is the case for all programming languages which have trademarks owned by some entity; C++ has a trademark policy, but it doesn't seem to have any restrictions regarding uses of the name that don't imply direct affiliation.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago> - Is this a new tactic, at least in terms of open source communities Large open source projects have trademarks since forever. Nothing seems particularly novel here.
- jchw 2y agoThat's not a fair characterization. Large open source projects haven't even existed forever! And none of the obvious large open source projects from the earlier days started out having foundations or trademarks. Clearly, it had to have a genesis somewhere.
- II2II 2y agoI don't know if this is the genesis, but the first time this came to my attention was with Linux. Basically: a third-party trademarked Linux several years after the project's origin, then started going after companies that were distributing Linux. Legal battle ensued. Linus Torvalds was eventually assigned the trademark. Innocence lost. Trademarks likely existed for (what we would now call) open source software prior to that, but I think Linux was a turning point since it meant that community (rather than commercial) software now had to consider such prospects.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y agoRust also didn’t start out with a trademark. But once they are established, trademarks come naturally.
- jchw 2y agoYes, which is sort of my point, of course things didn't start this way. No trademark means no trademark policy, after all. And more to the point, there was definitely a first time that an open source project instituted a trademark policy that says "You can use this name for unofficial events as long as it's clear its not official, but you must adhere to these additional rules when doing so." This sits somewhere between more and less restrictive trademark and brand policies that either allow it for a certain use case without much other consideration or disallow it without permission without much other consideration. It's hard to know exactly when it would even be considered enforceable, since referring to something by its name is usually not a violation of trademark in any case.