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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

This... seems reasonable? If you want to modify and distribute Rust/Cargo then you have to call your distribution something else. Call it Oxide/Freight and you’re set.

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I agree, but still think it might be considered reasonable not to want to rebrand in some cases—like patching Cargo to try and check with the package manager first when installing packages. It obviously won’t (and shouldn’t) get accepted mainstream, but it doesn’t also seem confusing enough to warrant a necessarily different name.

So you would make a thing called "Cargo" that was almost the same as Cargo except for some custom patches? That sounds pretty confusing to me.

Is it very different than the Linux kernel? There are thousands of custom versions, old versions, and strange architectures and they're all called "Linux" and it's worked fine so far. Some organizations even backport security fixes without changing the version number. As long as you're clear about what you're doing, why is this any more confusing?

For some definition of fine =P

The word “Linux” no longer has a singular meaning. And distributions have their own branding.

If someone wants to release DebianRust and DebianCargo that would be perfectly fine and non-confusing. A distribution could also make an agreement to use the Rust/Cargo trademark under some mutually agreeable terms. Likely having to do with no major changes and staying updated.

Most Linux distributions apply patches to software they distribute (e.g. for integration or security fixes). That is expected. If trademark forbids that, then it adds problems and confusion (like Firefox renamed to Iceweasel in Debian, until they reached some agreement with Mozilla Foundation).

> until they reached some agreement with Mozilla Foundation

Sounds like a fair and reasonable outcome?

This is the bread-and-butter of what Linux distributions do. A large number of larger software are slightly altered in order to integrate this or fix that, but they are close enough to the original that there's little confusion in practice that e.g. Debian's Mesa is still Mesa, and Debian's kernel is still Linux, despite alterations.

It still does the same thing, but now in a non-general, distro-specific way. Hundreds of distributions customize their software like that: for example, I believe it is actually more common to find gnome-terminal with patched-in transparency than the vanilla one without it.

For ages prior to the LibreOffice fork, OpenOffice in Linux package managers was actually go-ooo

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