Re: Consideration for Rust contributions in Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Imagine being an organizer of an existing long-standing Rust event that
  > helped to get Rust where it is today and now being expected to crawl to
  > them asking for permission to keep the name of the event.

One could imagine renaming the event to Bust, Dust, Gust, Lust or
maybe Distrust.

But we need to keep focus on the aspects of this policy which are
worse than merely irritating.  The adoption of this policy would make
the unmodified Rust compiler source code nonfree unless we devise a
way to remove all uses of the trademark, as trademark law understands
the concept.

How MUCH alterattion that would require, and how much work that would
be, I am not sure.  Would a global replace of `rust' with `lust' in
the source files of the Rust compiler suffice?  It would include a
similar renaming of source file names.  It would not be the minimal
possible change as measured by diff, but it might be the change that
is the least work.

One would have the installation script create a symlink or alias from
/usr/bin/rust to /usr/bin/lust.  Trademark law, from what lawyers have
told me, covers communications to human beings, not commands for
programs.

Pu Lu, can you find places where discussion of this is happening, and
tell us?

Would someone with a fast build machine like to volunteer to play with
such renamings?

I hope they will change the policy before adopting it for real.
It would be better if the unmodified files were free software
and we could distribute them unmodified.  We have no reason to make any change
in Rust sources except to excape gratuitous trademark problems.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)