Unfortunately, the Rust Foundation has put forth an ill-advised and unnecessarily draconian Rust Trademark Policy Proposal that will have a lasting effect on its brand within the community. This is the unfortunate part of this story. I hope other Rust entities can act quickly and appropriately to maintain credibility and rehabilitate the Rust Foundation's relationship with the community over time. However, something has been broken, and it will take time to fix it.
We all need a robust Rust Foundation to safeguard against official misrepresentation and abuse. However, this shouldn't result in overly restrictive trademark policies regarding logo size, styles, domain names, or the ways and conditions under which people can monetize their content and services using the unavoidable trademarked assets.
Software programming is a unique discipline where passion, expertise, and creativity can make orders of magnitude difference in outcomes, potentially resulting in tremendous momentum if fostered correctly. Preventing genuine creativity and expression can have the opposite effect, stopping or significantly slowing down otherwise exponential growth.
Rust is one of those transformative technologies that doesn't merely improve cosmetics but fundamentally changes the underlying principles. It holds the potential to emerge as one of the most prevalent technologies in the coming decades for all the right reasons.
This is why Rust is bigger than any of the entities that constitute it.
We must work together to amplify its resonance with our collective craftsmanship, respect our respective domains of expertise, and empower one another whenever possible. Allowing one entity to exercise unreasonable control over another simply because it legally can is counterproductive and will only slow Rust's inevitable growth.
Overall, after seeing this tweet from the Rust Project, I am optimistic that this issue will be resolved nicely, and we will return to normal without worrying about the Rust logo size on our homepages.
Hopefully, the Rust Foundation will conduct a postmortem and make necessary changes to prevent such events from happening again. We all make mistakes; it's how we face them that makes the difference.
To my YouTube followers asking if I will continue to create Rust video tutorials, the answer is a big, emphatic YES with huge Rust logos, because Rust is fantastic and deserves its logo to be gigantic!
Happy coding.
