[dathinab]

> This is a trademark policy

exactly

but if you distribute something containing a trademark and the trade mark policies don't allow distribution it is pretty much automatically a gray area of trade mark infringement

i.e. you do a clone of the rust repo and a some changes is with the current form of the draft trade mark infringement as long as you don't also at least 1. rename the repo, 2. update the readme

but even if you do it might still not be enough

trademark law as it currently is can easily be ab-used as an additional form of copy right protection and as long as you don't replace any occurrences of rust/cargo you are always trading in a potential gray area of law which can be abused

and who wants to contribute under such circumstances?

also who wants to contribute if they have to change the readme/repo name just to make a bug branch but then also not have it in the PR you submit, but also needing to have this changes in any branch including the PR ...

[yuliyp]

> if you distribute something containing a trademark and the trade mark policies don't allow distribution it is pretty much automatically a gray area of trade mark infringement

The whole world is shades of gray, but this is more like a wispy cirrus cloud than a dark cumulonimbus. If it's clear that there's no intent to cause confusion (and I suspect that if you're not creating releases in that repo that would be a pretty easy case) then there's not really much of a trademark infringement case to be made.

In the absence of such a trademark policy you'd have the exact same concerns. Them trying to go after people who fork on github would be a waste of time for everyone concerned: there would be no damages unless they went through the trouble of finding someone who had somehow actually been confused, and a C&D would accomplish nothing positive for the Rust Foundation anyway.