Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark

[lkcl <luke.leighton@gmail.com>]

ah. right. sorry Mark i missed something.

whilst you *as developers* have been in contact with the Rust Foundation
and presumably have private assurances that your use of the Trademarked
word "rust" is Authorised under License (through either implication or by
actual explicit approval) absolutely nobody else does.

all *new* gcc developers for example who have *not* been party to
those private conversations may not safely assume that they are part
of any such explicit or implicit consent.

and given that literally anyone in the world may pick up the gcc source
code and consider themselves to become a developer (as permitted
by the GPL) that's a serious concern.

in addition to that, even if you as developers have indeed been
explicitly or implicitly granted a Trademark License that does *not*
extend to *Distributors* of gcc and i again refer you to the wording that i
copied here, and to the debian bugreport.

i appreciate that this is a bloody nuisance.  i do however expect the
Rust Foundation to get their act together and act Reasonably and
Fairly to sort out the mess they've accidentally created.

after all, Trademarks do have value in FOSS Projects, to protect
them from harm in ways that Copyright Licenses cannot touch.
it's just rather unfortunate that they're really not well-understood,
not even by Lawyers!

l.