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> Either way, it's interesting to see committees and foundations going for these sorts of power grabs.

I really hate thinking of this sort of stuff as a power grab. Unlike copyright, trademarks are something that is useful for the consumer/user. I want to know whether something is official or not, and throwing a trademark around ruins that.

For uses of trademarks that make it clear that they are not official uses, it doesn't even matter what the trademark owner's policy is because they don't have a legal leg to stand on. People have the right to refer to you no matter what you think. That being said, when you're not talking about FOSS stuff, people have the right to pull your licensing if you don't abide by their policies. But when it's FOSS, there's nothing they can do about it.

There is nothing to any of these FOSS foundations other than their trademarks. They exist to decide what they approve of and what they disapprove of, and allowing the mark is how they make that clear. You can fork everything that they have, change "Rust" to "Bust," register the "Bust Foundation," and name yourself president, all in the same day. The Bust Foundation will be no less legitimately a steward of the code than the Rust Foundation. But I'll be sticking with the Rust Foundation, at least for now, and the mark helps me do that.

It sounds like a powergrab to me, but there's some nuance to it. Look at it this way:

> Your materials for the event must not imply that the event is officially endorsed or run by the Rust Project or Rust Foundation unless you have written permission.

You can't imply an event is official without permission. Very reasonable. Not a powergrab. This is the same sort of thing that Firefox does to prevent modified versions of Firefox from being called Firefox.

> For commercial events (including sponsored ones), please check in with us.

But then there's this. This implies that there are extra rules for an event that is "commercial" even if it does not try to pretend to be an official event; merely using the trademark and being a commercial event would compel you to adhere to some other set of rules, which they didn't even write in the policy.

On its face, that doesn't sound unreasonable, but I imagine the net cast over what counts as "commercial events" probably makes very few reasonable events possible that wouldn't fall under this umbrella.

It's an interesting choice in my opinion.

> - Is this a new tactic, at least in terms of open source communities

Large open source projects have trademarks since forever. Nothing seems particularly novel here.

That's not a fair characterization. Large open source projects haven't even existed forever! And none of the obvious large open source projects from the earlier days started out having foundations or trademarks. Clearly, it had to have a genesis somewhere.

I don't know if this is the genesis, but the first time this came to my attention was with Linux. Basically: a third-party trademarked Linux several years after the project's origin, then started going after companies that were distributing Linux. Legal battle ensued. Linus Torvalds was eventually assigned the trademark. Innocence lost.

Trademarks likely existed for (what we would now call) open source software prior to that, but I think Linux was a turning point since it meant that community (rather than commercial) software now had to consider such prospects.

Rust also didn’t start out with a trademark. But once they are established, trademarks come naturally.

Yes, which is sort of my point, of course things didn't start this way. No trademark means no trademark policy, after all.

And more to the point, there was definitely a first time that an open source project instituted a trademark policy that says "You can use this name for unofficial events as long as it's clear its not official, but you must adhere to these additional rules when doing so." This sits somewhere between more and less restrictive trademark and brand policies that either allow it for a certain use case without much other consideration or disallow it without permission without much other consideration. It's hard to know exactly when it would even be considered enforceable, since referring to something by its name is usually not a violation of trademark in any case.

It's not entirely a new thing for Rust, at any rate. The current trademark policy [1] is very similar:

> Using the Rust trademarks (even in modified form) for social events like meetups, tutorials, and the like is allowed for events that are free to attend.

[1]: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-me...

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this has more to do with grifters and griefers than it does about power. Those are people who have the potential to create a lot of expensive headaches or public relations headaches for the organizations supporting their respective languages since the grifters and griefers are only concerned about their own motivations (profit or otherwise).

C++ is an entirely different thing. Even though it is backed by a standards body, it is far less centralized. Most people associate C++ with a language and I doubt that there are very many people who view it as a project backed by a particular organization.

not new, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_trade...

This is the first thing that came to mind for me too. However, I am distinguishing this particular case (e.g. enforcing that you don't use trademarks in a way that would imply something is official) with the Rust/Go/Python trademark policies (e.g. enforcing a set of rules when using a trademark to refer to something in a clearly unofficial context.)

> using trademark to enforce rules on unofficial events ... seems to me to be relatively recent.

It isn't. It's completely standard practice. Python uses it in the same way and you probably didn't even notice (and Go as you discovered).

It's not a new tactic. It's literally what trademark law is designed for.

It's completely standard practice now, but since when? It didn't start this way because open source projects didn't used to be so big that they had foundations and trademarks.

Furthermore, I think there's a bit of nuance that people continue to miss: I'm not referring to having trademark rules. I am familiar with Linux and Mozilla, arguably the earliest "open source" organizations to deal with trademarks and have trademark policies.

What I'm referring to more specifically is what Go and Rust are doing for events: they seem to be applying additional rules for events that use the trademark in a way that does not imply affiliation. I think this is something that has not generally been the case for open source trademarks.