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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”

#261

Post by keymone »

KirinDave wrote: post #238
keymone wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should easily be able to answer a simple question: what in Clojure is biased towards Datomic?

My experience with this conversation is that there is nothing I could say that would make you ever acknowledge my experience or feelings. Even the act of stating my opinion on a subjective matter is getting downvoted, because folks are so eager to NOT talk about this except under the lens of Hickey making shirt jokes. And it drives home the actual point I wanted to make about how some languages are in theory forkable…

a pity, i was hoping you had an actual example.

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

#262

Post by sheeshkebab »

kemonocode wrote: post #39
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

The license is pretty much AS-IS license that tells nothing of copyright or potential patents behind this, and simply covers google of any claims against them. It doesn't grant anything to licensee, for open or commercial use, nor clarifies any sticky points.

Compare that to Apache 2.0's 2nd and 3rd clauses:

"2. Grant of Copyright License.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

3. Grant of Patent License.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."

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

#263

Post by stevewilhelm »

Rerarom wrote: post #83
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…

What about Ruby?

As of 2011, Matsumoto is the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San Francisco. He is a fellow of Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development organisation in Rakuten Inc. He was appointed to the role of technical advisor for VASILY, Inc. starting in June 2014. - From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto

Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

bigtunacan wrote: post #148
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…

History doesn't really support that. PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, Lua. Successful programming languages seem to come in equal measures from both large corporate backers and not. There is certainly the need for network effects which large corporations often can provide more consistently, but we have seen plenty of examples within the space where individuals or smaller companies have been successful in providing thes…

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by badsectoracula »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #258
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?

If it's an actual, standards adherent implementation of Go, nobody should a shit what you call it. If it actually changes the language spec, then you would have to rename it for legal reason, but you should also want to rename it - unless it's a backwards compatible superset of the language, you wouldn't want people to think it's YAGC and just feed it their vanilla Go code and be surprised when it doesn't work.

How does the adherence to Go's spec of a compiler affects its legality with regards to the compiler's name? And why is that an exception if it is a backwards compatible superset when a new version of the "real" Go could come out with new features that are incompatible with the extensions (thus rendering the previously compatible superset now incompatible and presumable illegal)?

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

#266

Post by badsectoracula »

UncleMeat wrote: post #230
Crinus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Since when has being able to use a derivative of the name ever been a requirement (or important) for free software?

The original toplevel comment was about making a new compiler, not a derivative of an existing one, the comment you reply to is a continuation of that discussion not a standalone comment. The implication here is that the open source license is about a specific implementation and only covers that implementation but it doesn't cover its name, as you rightfully point out. Munificent wrote that the open source license protects you if you decide to create your own Go compiler and name using a derivative of the Go name, but this is wrong since the open source license does not cover the name.

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

#267

Post by hnlmorg »

zemo wrote: post #222
bigtunacan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History doesn't really support that. PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, Lua. Successful programming languages seem to come in equal measures from both large corporate backers and not. There is certainly the need for network effects which large corporations often can provide more consistently, but we have seen plenty of examples within the space where individuals or smaller companies have been successful in providing thes…

Lua was the consequence of trade embargoes in Brazil. It was created with substantial institutional support.

As well as targeting a use case that didn't have much competition (at that time).

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

#268

Post by MikeLui »

phillipcarter wrote: post #195
MikeLui wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest. I would not accept “just trust me” as a response. As long as there’s a possible conflict of interest, there will be ethical concerns.

> This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest. With the key difference being that you can use a different language and achieve the same results you want. You can't just pick a different government.

Yes, but they are both still conflicts of interest. Also as the other poster mentions, as Go accrues popularity, it is not always as easy as picking another language.

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

#269

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

badsectoracula wrote: post #265
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's an actual, standards adherent implementation of Go, nobody should a shit what you call it. If it actually changes the language spec, then you would have to rename it for legal reason, but you should also want to rename it - unless it's a backwards compatible superset of the language, you wouldn't want people to think it's YAGC and just feed it their vanilla Go code and be surprised when it doesn't work.

How does the adherence to Go's spec of a compiler affects its legality with regards to the compiler's name? And why is that an exception if it is a backwards compatible superset when a new version of the "real" Go could come out with new features that are incompatible with the extensions (thus rendering the previously compatible superset now incompatible and presumable illegal)?

The point I'm trying to make is there's a difference between re-implementing the language and forking it, is there not?

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

#270

Post by sonnyblarney »

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.

This apparent, but that's because there does not seem to be any obvious conflicts of interest - further diminished by the fact that they're all paid by Google, work for Google, and inherently serve Google's interest.

If push came to shove, and we saw a war between G and say ... Oracle, over a kind of 'programming language' ... you can be darn sure the claws will come out and it will be apparent 'who owns what' etc..

In the end it may not matter: Go is what it is, it's not set up for licensing or battle, so this all may be moot.

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