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

Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 346 posts

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#21

Post by ritchiea »

brianberns wrote: post #7
nickcw wrote: post #4

A very well written piece by Ian Lance Taylor. If you don't want to read it all, he summarizes it here: > In effect, then, the current state is what the blog post suggests at the very end: final decisions about the Go language are made by the core Go team, and the core Go team all work at Google, but there is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language.

> There is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language. That's like saying that there's no meaningful sense in which I, apart from my brain and nervous system, make decisions about what my body does.

There's a lot more nuance in the original post, outlining that Go is fully open source & it can be forked. That the author believes any good open source project should have a coherent vision and a set of decision makers. That the actual committers to Go are majority Googlers but not overwhelmingly so (59 Googlers to 51 others).

There is more to Go than Google, there is a community and it is as free as can be. But the final decision makers are at Google. It's all very well said, every open source project has a set of final decision makers and that project is theirs. Unless you work hard to become one of those decision makers the project is not yours. And perhaps it is not notable to write the blog post "this open source project ACTUALLY belongs to so-and-so."

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#22

Post by fastball »

Crinus wrote: post #18

So if it isn't Google's language, does it mean i can go and make my own compiler for it, call it -say- "Crinus Go" (to differentiate it from Google's Go but still point out that it is an implementation of Go) and not worry about Google coming after me?

The language is not the name.

The name is protected.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#23

Post by et2o »

“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It” —- Google employee’s defenses of Go

Even if it is theoretically true that Go is open source, by employing the majority of the Core Go team, Google exercises extensive soft power over Go. All of the defenses of Go seem to gloss over this.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#27

Post by jsty »

coldtea wrote: post #14

> The blog post starts by quoting @kapoorsunny asking why there can't be something like OpenGo, with a community implementation of generics. I hope that it is clear that the answer is that there could be. Nothing prevents that from happening. In particular, Google doesn't prevent that from happening. No, but like with the community developed dependency solution, Google can arbitrarily chose not to include it in Go, e…

But this is the same with any open source project - you can write as much code as you want, but if those with the commit bits decide they don't like it, it's not getting upstreamed.

If you were really keen to push some functionality into the Linux kernel, but Linus decided he didn't like it, you'd be in exactly the same position. The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really change much.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#28

Post by BartBoch »

irishsultan wrote: post #15
shurcooL wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It loads okay in an incognito window for me. Are you sure logging in was mandatory? It should only be needed if you want to post to the mailing list.

One of the annoying things about Google is that if it detects that at some point in the past you were logged in as a user it will not let you see Google Groups content without logging in (or going incognito). There is no "just let me see the content, I can't be bothered to type my password right now" option, there is no "forget that I'm that user" option, the only option is to log in or to go incognito.

Deleting cookies should help?

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#29

Post by luckylion »

astazangasta wrote: post #12

A lot of technology development happens at Google and FB and AirBnb these days because that is where the money is, so that is where the smart people go. In the previous generation they would have been at Xerox or Bell Labs. The work they do is often generic and of general interest. We should resist the idea that because the creators are sojourning in the bosom of some corporation, that corp "owns" the work. This is a…

> This is a key benefit of open source: we can take the freedom granted by being useful to monopoly capitalism and use it to liberate work for the public good, thus diffusing that monopoly power.

In theory. In practice, a fork on that scale rarely happens because it would require a large part of the community to adapt, lots of supporting services to switch etc, which is unlikely to happen unless it's a major issue like "oh btw we're shutting everything down next month". Convenience keeps developers with how it's currently working, and developers are the community.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#30

Post by shawnz »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #24

https://golang.org/LICENSE Not GPL. Therefore it doesn't matter. Some corporate overlord has the power to kill/modify at whim. GPL(2.0) for comparison: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

Huh? Even if it were GPL, how would that prevent "some corporate overlord" from changing the license later?
Post reply on HN