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

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

#31

Post by thanatos_dem »

boapnuaput wrote: post #10

Keep reading; further down the thread, Rob "Commander" Pike found it "a surprise" that Google trademarked Go. Maybe Pike feels that Go isn't Google's language, but it certainly seems that Google does indeed have a modicum of control over Go, and that that control is above and beyond the Go authors' perception.

Of course not, it's not Google's language, it's Rob Pike's language. The logo was designed by his wife, and most of the questionable design choices in Go are there because of his opinions, such as the dubious dependency management and lack of generics.

A lot of the power of go comes from it being opinionated, but that same opinionated approach is a real pain for some (it turns out common) use cases. With all that said, Go is my language of choice, and I'm happy that Rob seems to be less involved with Go 2.0, and that the core Go team is incorporating user feedback rather than just dismissing complaints as Pike seemed so inclined to do.

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

#32

Post by a1369209993 »

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.

I think it's more like saying that there's no meaningful sense in which your body, apart from your pancreas, makes decisions about how much insulin your pancreas secretes. It is technically true, just... only technically.

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

#33

Post by z3c0 »

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.

I agree that it's worded confusingly, but I think I can see the point they're making. Solutioning usually looks vastly different when driven by a core team than when it's driven by higher-ups or "The Business". The Go Core team is likely more vested in the overall success of the language than the rest of Google.

I'm not certain, because - like I said - it's worded confusingly, but that was my impression.

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

#34

Post by d0m »

>> I do think that it will be interesting to see what happens if someone on the core Go team decides to leave Google and but wants to continue working on Go.

Or, what would happen if non-google employees on the core Go team were to take Go in a direction that Google's leadership didn't want to?

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

#35

Post by dmos62 »

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…

That's a pretty good perspective; lemons to lemonade type of reasoning. If you have a centralization of talent and money, it easily leads to monopolization and stagnation, but if you manage to sail against the wind, so to speak, and you coerce that gigantic cluster of capital into outputting open-source, interop-friendly tech, you've hijacked the monopoly machine for the common good. However, it _is_ sailing against the wind: if Google wasn't good at preserving the monopoly and we weren't bad at enforcing fair competition and regulation, we wouldn't be in this situation.

By the way, what did you mean by "the corporate origin of governance"?

Edit: I second the call for more discussion on this. I think parent is making a valid point that doesn't merit an off-hand rejection by downvote.

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

#36

Post by thanatos_dem »

shawnz wrote: post #30
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?

You can still fork the code up until the point of the license change and freely modify it going forward.

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

#37

Post by brianberns »

z3c0 wrote: post #33
brianberns wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree that it's worded confusingly, but I think I can see the point they're making. Solutioning usually looks vastly different when driven by a core team than when it's driven by higher-ups or "The Business". The Go Core team is likely more vested in the overall success of the language than the rest of Google. I'm not certain, because - like I said - it's worded confusingly, but that was my impression.

> The Go Core team is likely more vested in the overall success of the language than the rest of Google.

I think you could say that about most teams at most companies. That doesn't mean that they have any autonomy whatsoever from their company, though.

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

#38

Post by droithomme »

fastball wrote: post #22
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.

> The name is protected.

Let's assume first that is true.

And these articles are about Go being Google's language, which is empirically and legally true.

Different from C. I can write a C compiler with extensions and release it, call it C or "Something-C" and no IP problems. I can even call it Standard C and even if it's not no one can do anything. I maybe can't call it ANSI C if it's not standard compliant, but that's because ANSI is a protected term, not C. And unlike Go.

Now let's assume it's not true.

In that case Go is not Google's language and there are no ip issues. I can make and release a compiler, call it a Go compiler, and I'm fine.

Which is it? Unsure. I find no information suggesting Go is trademarked. But there are people like in your post claiming that it is. If so that should be easy to cite. I really don't know which it is. So many people claiming the word Go is protected. Perhaps they have better references than I could find and we can figure out what sort of language Go really is.

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

#39

Post by kemonocode »

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

That's the 3-Clause BSD license [0], which is arguably more open than the GPL (On varying definitions of "openness" at least. It's very lax, although it doesn't prevent patent treachery)

[0] https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

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

#40

Post by astazangasta »

luckylion wrote: post #29
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 l…

Why does it have to fork that hard? C is used everywhere; there are ISO standards for it. UNIX also escaped the bounds of AT&T a while back as POSIX. The same could happen elsewhere also.
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