this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Now this I can get behind!
update: I received a letter from the rust foundation stating that my use of the word rust violates their trademark policy. I have to redact my pervious comment.
Holy shit... The balls of that policy. "Hey, we took two common words of the English language for our project. They're ours now."
The psuedo-friendly tone where they define fair use as "all the places we want you to market for us, and none of the ones we don't" (specifically "showing support of rust"... Not as in "our software supports rust", but "I want to praise rust publicly") and you use the word rust in a project... So I guess -rust can probably be licensed if we ask.
I think I figured out the hack - you use the word rust, along with the logo for the still popular game rust (released 2 years before it). They'll be paralyzed by the mental gymnastics it takes to twist their stance into a "friendly cease and desist" for months. And when it finally comes, you can insist you were talking about the game, Rust, using familiar programming concepts allegorically to comment on game mechanics and emergent design and through player interaction and feedback.
Then you say "I think I've heard of rust-lang in the last couple years, some people really seem to like it. But library availability is a concern, do you have a good package manager? Can I find a package for most things I might need?"
I just wanna point out that what can and can't be done with a trademark is defined by law and not by the wishes of some corpo
Sure, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a Corp that frames fair use as a subset of fair use, making allowances only when it's beneficial to them for marketing
For the most cut and dry example, they allow blog posts praising them... What about a blog post offering a nuanced criticism? What about a satiric post about them?
Those are both undeniably fair use, but by framing it as outside fair use, they're being shit heels