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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

One of the main justifications for inventing the Rust Foundation was to have a good place to own Rust's trademarks, which were previously owned by Mozilla.

The foundation is now nine months old, but I don't see any announcement on its website saying that the trademarks have been transferred.

The Rust website [1] says that the Rust trademark is still owned by the Mozilla Foundation.

The README in Rust's git repository [2] says it's owned by the Rust Foundation.

I am distinctly unimpressed by the foundation's communication skills so far.

[1] https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/media-guide [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust

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I can't speak to the foundation's performance or communication, but the purpose is more than holding its trademarks; it's for holding any/all assets for the organization. I thought the main catalyst for the rust foundation was there being many people/organizations which wanted to donate/fund development of rust but no means for handling the money (responsibly).

Well AFAICT the foundation isn't funding any developers at the moment, either. I remember from the discussions that was always a far-off goal. Though it probably does make it easier to coordinate donating hardware resources.

The foundation is funding oncall support staff for crates.io which was a much more urgent need than funding more devs.

Amazon, Microsoft, Huawei, Google and Futurewei are all now employing a good chunk of the devs to work on it full time.

I believe the first major funding by the Rust Foundation was hiring Ferrous to help develop and maintain crates.io:

https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-10-18-crates-io-...

Well, that may mean that none of the Rust Foundation sponsors have managed to pull off an insider gambit to obtain a trademark licensing deal which unduly advantages them! :) (e.g. control over a canonical domain, official conference, etc.)

However, it can also mean that nobody's minding the store, allowing some company to establish a mark in practice which will be difficult to take back later. (This has happened multiple times with ASF projects: CouchDB and CouchBase, Mesos and Mesosphere...)

The last minutes they have published was for the May meeting [0], and there have even been talk about making the release of the minutes faster in some of the ones that are published.

[0]: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/meetings/

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