Go == Simplicity
Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
51–60 of 346 posts
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And you can't with a BSD-style license?
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#53So 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?
Yes, you have always been able to do that. The open source license it uses enables that.
The open source license allows me to fork the implementation of Go, but not use a derivative of the Go name for my derivative of the Go implementation (to ensure/show, among others, that people know that my work is about Go and not some other language or something i came up with).
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#54I feel like some people/groups are obsessed with community owned/open source languages/infrastructure. At the end of the day, most of these are controlled by a small group of individuals and we put different wrappers around them/labels...
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#55So 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?
llvmgo and gccgo would indicate, yes you can.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Why does it have to fork that hard?
Because most will (sooner or later) become incompatible as goals diverge. You're right that it could happen, but I don't see it as likely, be that a programming language or a tool.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#57> 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…
This reminds me of the mono project and Microsoft’s .NET languages. It’s doable.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#58Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had made Go, no one would be using it right now. Network effects matter in languages. People want all the upsides of the network effects (i.e. the ecosystem and adoption), but none of the downsides (it's propped up by a big company with massive network effects).
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Both Go and the Go logo are trademarked, see the responses in the linked post (use private mode if Google asks for login).
Thanks. I read further along in the linked post and found this comment by Rob Pike, one of Go's chief developers:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/6dKNSN0M_kg/dMCQ...
> The name Go is not trademarked by Google, at least as a programming language trademark. There are other things Google makes called Go (an interesting signal on its own) and they might be trademarked, but Go the language is not a trademark.
> -rob
But, here is Google's official trademark list:
https://www.google.com/permissions/trademark/trademark-list/
> Golang™ programming language
> Go™ programming language
Golang and Go are trademarked by Google as programming languages and Rob Pike is not aware of this. That is interesting. Rob should be made aware.
And so the debate is now settled: Go is in fact Google's programming language, as an empirical legal fact.
Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”
#60It's obvious that Golang is Google's language. The most obvious part is they require a CLA that gives them and only them special rights. It's a sham.