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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”

#71

Post by shuzchen »

purpleidea wrote: post #60

It'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.

I don't know of any large open source project that doesn't require a CLA. As the post suggests, perhaps one day there'll be a Golang Foundation, which would otherwise have ownership of whatever code you contribute. See that Python has a CLA that gives the PSF ownership of your code: https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/

Even the linux kernel has a CLA, they just call it by another name (Developer Certificate of Origin)

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

#72

Post by nurettin »

Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle.

If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-controversial features. Question is: Is this assessment sensible and if so, is the community able or willing to make this kind of investment?

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

#73

Post by stephenr »

holografix wrote: post #62
purpleidea wrote: post #60

It'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.

Care to explain what a CLA is? Assuming a legal term...?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreemen...

Basically signing over rights of what you contribute to the company running the project.

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

#74

Post by sbov »

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…

Note that Go is trademarked. C wasn't. IANAL but there probably, legally, cannot be a Go++ or Go#.

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

#75

Post by walterstucco »

objektif wrote: post #65
c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone'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 m…

Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?

It's Google's fault if python is so widespread

No Google, no Python

Imagine it

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

#76

Post by dpc_pw »

objektif wrote: post #65
c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone'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 m…

Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?

Wasn't it Google that heavily used Python that popularized it a lot?

And JS was born and evolved with the browser.

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

#77

Post by rusk »

objektif wrote: post #65
c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone'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 m…

Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?

Javascript was Netscape, and adopted by various other megacorps (such ad Microsoft and ... Google) over the years in various guises.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

objektif wrote: post #65
c3534l wrote: post #58

Everyone'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 m…

Is that really true though? What abiut python and javascript for example? Did they have a giant corp behind them?

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by tokai »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #31
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 sai…

> The logo was designed by his wife

They changed it. https://blog.golang.org/go-brand

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

#80

Post by gwd »

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.

Actually, I think the other key argument is here:

> I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people.

He points out that there are over 100 committers, nearly half of which are non-Google; it's only the small group of people in charge of the language spec that are at Google.

It may be true that Google the company don't drive Go the language. However, simply working in the same company tends to make you take on the perspective and values of that company.

In the Xen Project, for instance, Citrix is the largest single contributor. Citrix management have basically left the engineers working in the Xen to our own devices; but nonetheless we've made a conscious effort to diversify the organizational membership of the core decision-makers in the project: partly to make sure that we're not drifting into a Citrix-centric groupthink, and partly to avoid the appearance of Xen being a Citrix-only project.

If I were them, I would be looking for an opportunity to arrange to have at least one non-Googler on the core Go team, for the same reasons.

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