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Comment by c-cube | Hacker News Reader

The domain name is quite adequate, this is hyperbola indeed. Since when do the 4 freedoms include the right to fork under the same name? This is a rude thing to do anyway (hostile, even).

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It is not about having the right to fork under the same name only, but also having the ability to apply small patches to the code without going to the great lengths of rebranding everything---of course we can discuss if changing a single bit from the source code would qualify the result as a fork or not.

Ah, thanks for the precision. How do distributions typically handle that? And why does GNU feel the need to patch rustc, is it for things that can't be upstreamed?

Somebody with better knowledge of that will hopefully chime in. My impression is that most of the distributions either don't patch upstream besides the build recipes, and upstream maintainers turn a blind eye to that. The ones that do, though (e.g. Debian), take the approach described on the OP and rebrand it (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_... ).

I’m not aware of any distro that rebrands Rust.

You can see Debian's patches to rustc here: https://sources.debian.org/patches/rustc/1.34.2+dfsg1-1/

I feel like the expression "turn a blind eye" is overstating things a bit. My understanding is that Mozilla can permit whatever they please with their trademarks. There's no expectation that they should be particularly strict. (Unlike, say, law enforcement, where there is an expectation that they should be strict, and turning a blind eye is a gray area.) Maybe I'm splitting hairs here though.

Right, and I guess this is in particular a problem that Linux/BSD distributions face, where they want to apply small patches for interoperability and the like, but still want to offer it to their users as "Rust".

That’s not explicitly allowed but de facto allowed. I don’t know how else it could be done. Unless there is a definition for what is a minor change (sounds nearly impossible), the choice is to either disallow it and not enforce it (current way) or allow things that aren’t rust to be marketed as rust (worse).

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