How do GitHub and Gitlab get away with this? Have they been given permission by Conservancy? Or are they in violation?
(Bitcoin is also originally a LF project; in Git, like BitTorrent, and similar to BitGold only in name, for a reason. Bitcoin initially lacked a Foundation to hold trademarks, in particular.)
The choosealicense.com table of licenses in the appendix is a service of GitHub, and GitLab also donates free CI build runner minutes for Open Source projects: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use :
> Trademark use
> This license explicitly states that it does NOT grant trademark rights, even though licenses without such a statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark rights.
Trademarks are like copyright licenses where if you haven't been given explicit permission, then you don't have any. (The difference is that you can lose your trademark if you don't actively police misuse, but that's beside the point.)
(GitHub is a good example of why the policy exists. They borrowed liberally from Git's brand; conflated Git and github.com in the minds of tens of thousands of people, maybe even millions, registered a trademark for "GitHub"; and began going after people who do the very type of borrowing that GitHub themselves did. They ultimately ended up causing issues for the Git project when it sought a trademark, since the GitHub trademark already existed at that point.)