I don't see this as a real fork, the same way CentOS isn't (or wasn't) a real fork for RedHat, or Iceweasel wasn't a real fork of Firefox. This seems only meant to be work around the trademark. If all this does is to establish an other, non-trademark encumbered name you can use to refer to the language and the compiler than that could be good.
If that’s what happens, it’s not a great outcome. Foundation changes policy, restricting the use of a mark, to enormous opposition. After much dissent, the community responds by… ceasing to use the mark. That’s what they were asking for! The policy was bad. So is disinviting someone from a keynote address. The question is, do you want those things to be changed? Acceding to the demands and quietly backing away, no matter how much fun it is to add a crab emoji file extension, will not achieve that on its own.
If a whole slew of things were only available in Crab, the Rust trade mark would be devalued. That would be the one coherent theory of why you would launch such a project and try to get others on board. And it is why Ashley G Williams was commenting in that Register piece on the lack of technical talent (“language designers”) that had jumped ship. Commitment of talent and effort and resources is by and large what makes the trade mark valuable. People who are important to the project leaving is the only useful measure of an effective protest.
Since the Crab project fails to mention any specific people who have signed on, or even who decided to create it, I don’t see it having any impact whatsoever. The Rust Foundation will not feel threatened by this. I suspect the maximum it can be is just another IceWeasel. That is certainly the vision laid out by this person on one of the issues, who despite posting as if they created it, is careful to disclaim any responsibility for the project or to call any of the decisions their own. (Come on!) https://github.com/crablang/crab/issues/14#issuecomment-1508...
It’s also the vision laid out on the website: “promoting the language without worrying about the litigation associated with trademark infringement.” Basically the project has outlined the least ambitious possible goals and apparently nobody is willing to sign their name on it. My advice is to write an open letter and open it for signatures instead.
As an end-run around the trademark policy in the iceweasel style, crablang is useless. You can already use rust without being in violation of the trademark policy - you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that.
The iceweasel situation is different AFAIR - Mozilla (IMHO reasonably) wants binaries that are called Firefox to be unmodified Firefox to avoid confusion, bug reports etc. Debian didn’t want to respect that policy and this decided to fork and patch, renaming the project to comply with the policy. You can do the same for rust, but that’s not what crablang does, at least now.
> you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that.
My understanding is the intention is that you can call your project crab-foo or your compiler crabby and be sure that nobody from Crab is going to get upset at you. You had that choice before, too, but now they've come up with a common name for everyone to share.
Sure, but the crab trademark is worthless. And you wouldn't need to fork the compiler to do that. The community, if it wished, could have formally or informally adopted <crab->foo as a naming scheme.
