Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 324 posts

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#91

Post by comex »

teddyh wrote: post #56
JupiterMoon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want. EDIT Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?

It also means that the company can sell proprietary versions with extended functionality, and the company is therefore motivated to not allow contributions to the free code which duplicates functionality which they sell.

However, since ChakraCore is released under a permissive license (like most corporate open source projects), Microsoft could do the same thing without a CLA. It matters more when something is under a GPL variant...

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#92

Post by Sanddancer »

Someone1234 wrote: post #60
krisdol wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be far easier with MIT than GPL? The BSD license sure did little to keep the open source roots of Mac OS thriving.

It could help Microsoft close source THEIR implementation later down the line, but it doesn't help them "extinguish" it completely, particularly if third parties wish to maintain it. MIT makes it easy to fork and relatively easy to re-license.

Which makes building a community the most important thing to do, to make it harder to keep closed forks closed. It's worked really well for LLVM/clang, with contributions coming from a number of normally open-source hostile sources. Conversely, were Microsoft's engine here GPLed, with the contributor licensing agreements open source organizations like Canonical and the FSF have, it would be a lot easier for them to close things back up, and take all the toys with them.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#93

Post by magicalist »

frigg wrote: post #88
jrcii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS really changed its approach to software Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet.

>Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). As far as I know they give you the option to opt out of everything. Are they bad even for asking?

> As far as I know they give you the option to opt out of everything

No, they don't, and two seconds of searching will confirm that for you. All many of us are asking is to be able to opt out of it.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#94

Post by tootie »

dmm wrote: post #5

> Finally, you can also use ChakraCore as the JavaScript engine in Node. This is interesting. You can use it as an alternative to v8 for node.js

Oracle was working on getting node to run on the JVM, but it wasn't really open and it looks like it was abandoned:

https://avatar-js.java.net/

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#95

Post by McGlockenshire »

frigg wrote: post #88
jrcii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS really changed its approach to software Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet.

>Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). As far as I know they give you the option to opt out of everything. Are they bad even for asking?

> As far as I know they give you the option to opt out of everything

The thing we now know as "telemetry" used to be opt-in, and they hide the opt-out control during initial setup behind a thing that is a link but doesn't look like one.

It can still be turned off after installation in the same exact way as the previous versions of Windows (enter "experience" in the Start menu search box), but most won't know that this control exists.

All the rest of the things causing people to freak out about privacy are related to Cortana, and the process for turning that feature set on is in-your-face opt-in, where it's clear that you're authorizing data sharing with them.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#96

Post by tareqak »

frigg wrote: post #88
jrcii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS really changed its approach to software Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet.

>Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). As far as I know they give you the option to opt out of everything. Are they bad even for asking?

You cannot fully opt out of the tracking Microsoft does in Windows 10. The lowest selection I can make is "Basic".

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#97

Post by Someone1234 »

jrcii wrote: post #31
DoubleMalt wrote: post #14

Even if I'm in danger of stating the obvious, but MS really changed its approach to software. And it is incredibly great having competition in the JS engine market.

> MS really changed its approach to software Their open-source friendliness has unfortunately coincided with a decline of their respect for user privacy and choice (Windows 10). I find the "New Microsoft" bittersweet.

The Windows 10 privacy thing is completely overblown.

Most of the privacy settings that people are most worried about is tied into Cortana or more specifically what you allow Cortana to do on your behalf. You can simply choose not to use Cortana or to disable it entirely. Google Now & Siri support the same functionality but ironically don't give you the settings to disable it, so nobody bats an eyelid.

Beyond that you only really have so called "basic telemetry." Which tells them when you launch a Windows 10 "app" and some basic computer information. But even without that setting/ability the apps themselves could conduct the same reporting (via direct HTTP requests), the only reason it is even a setting is because Microsoft unified it to make developers lives easier and to better aggregate the information their side.

Are people legitimately concerned that when they launch the XBox music app that Microsoft knows you did? Even without the Windows telemetry they could just look at their own server logs since the XBox Music app utilises so many web resources (e.g. images). The same is true with any developer, any app, on any platform.

Ultimately the whole thing is a bunch of noise and no substance. Nobody can actually point to exactly what specific information Microsoft is even taking, and have even less data yet still to back up any claims.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#98

Post by binarycrusader »

krisdol wrote: post #83
binarycrusader wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many projects do not, but some very popular ones do: Google Go requires one. Apache requires one. Some FSF projects require one. I could go on, but the point is that CLAs exist for good reasons. There may be another, different way to accomplish the same goals, but since it isn't my pocketbook funding the project, I don't feel like I have a right to complain. As such, just because a project has a CLA doesn't mean…

In the case of the MIT license, I don't see much harm in throwing in a CLA because it's nearly impossible for Microsoft to do anything to break the terms of the license; however, while I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, in general signing a CLA (including in this instance) often gives the other party rights to re-license the work and continue to use the work if they end up in violation of the original lic…

Regardless of what license the project is filed under, as an individual contributor working for free for the community, the license of a project determines the terms under which I am sharing my work. I expect those to be respected in perpetuity, and I would like the right to rescind my contribution if the copyright holder is in violation of the license.

The CLA is just another license to consider with the project; just like projects that have the "any later version" GPL clause. That little addition is important to some individuals.

I think a more successful argument would be against the lack of specific guarantees in existing CLAs, rather than CLAs themselves.

For example, the CLA could give joint copyright to the involved parties, but also agree to only publish the code under a license published by the Free Software Foundation.

CLAs, as you point out, are sometimes a necessary mechanism to ensure that a project can correct licensing issues when they arise. Obviously, through careful choice of licensing it may be possible to avoid the need for a CLA entirely, such as is starting to be done with the Apache License 2.0 by some projects.

So I would think of this differently: depending on the license, some projects may need a CLA for protections only available to them with one. For those projects, the community should encourage them to encode their intentions in the CLA to assuage fears and provide certain guarantees to contributors.

Finally, keep in mind that the entire world does not follow US Contract / Copyright law (or even the bern conventions). In some countries, a CLA may be the only possible way to ensure that a project won't have problems later. While the current versions of today's "free software" licenses have generally tried to account for that, legal situations change over time.

Re: ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

#99

Post by rayiner »

xenadu02 wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #18

Small thing, but nice to see that the API is exposed as C (easy to write bindings for) instead of C++ (near-impossible to write bindings for).

Slight derail but I find it interesting that the Swift team is tackling the fragile ABI problem with v3... Something C++ could have done at any time, enabling portable and interoperable C++ interfaces. (There's no reason clang importer couldn't surface C++ or any other language to Swift for that matter)

Even if you can easily parse C++,[1] there are a lot of practical impediments to binding to C++ libraries. If an API exposes templates, or relies on constructors/destructors, it's very hard to call that from non-C++ code. For example, SpiderMonkey wraps JS pointers in C++ objects and uses RAII to register roots being held by C++ code with the JS garbage collector. Handy, but more or less impossible to call from non-C++ code without writing a shim by hand.

[1] You young-uns and your Clang. I did a C++ binding generator for my GSoC project, and back then ('05) GCC was the only open-source thing that could parse C++, and you could only get at the parse tree by patching it to dump XML.

Post reply on HN