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Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#111

Post by phone8675309 »

pphysch wrote: post #86
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #8

Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.

Since the 70s, Washington has largely abandoned public investment in favor of the private sector. Zero surprise that this dynamic emerged in the software industry. Of course, in an alternate timeline where the government successfully funds public/"open source" software, this post would be titled "Stop Building on Government-Controlled Languages".

Even worse, neoliberal policies have taken things developed with public dollars and gave them away to private firms for them to close off and take ownership of.

Look at what happened to NSFNet and how it's no longer a network that's open but now a part of a large, billion/trillion dollar oligopoly with no obligation to serve anyone who won't make them a profit.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#113

Post by unity1001 »

charcircuit wrote: post #52
unity1001 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source projects are under financed Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago. You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features…

So become a corporation?

I think whatever format that works would be ok, right? A cooperative, or a foundation with an attached company (a la WP foundation + Automattic etc), whatever that works would be ok.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#114

Post by nottorp »

> remember when programming languages were free?

Cheap maybe. Turbo Pascal was 49.99. Linux was at 0.01 and very few people had access to hardware that could run gcc.

I thought it will be a rant against corporate controlled languages because you can't rely on them long term. Instead it's that the ide or package manager phones home.

Well so does apt or macports?

Edit: actually Turbo Pascal predates Linux 0.02 by 8 years.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#115

Post by mixmastamyk »

horsawlarway wrote: post #82

I think this is a fairly misguided rant, and ignores the real priorities (and risks) that I have as a developer - both personally and professionally. I'm happy to use languages funded by corporations - the incentives for them are clear, they fund development and work on the tooling and spec for their own use-case - they garner additional support, momentum, and goodwill by releasing the language under an open definiti…

> particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are.

This is substantially less than what code running on your machine can do, which is basically unlimited its spying capabilities. Yes, this is a problem in itself that needs to be fixed.

Otherwise you appear to willfully misunderstand. These may not be your priorities, but taking offense and framing them as "crazy" does a disservice.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#116

Post by crtc »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #81

I'm confused. When I go get ... is it "phoning home" to Google? I could wireshark it, but since we're all here...

It accesses the module proxy proxy.golang.org, which is run by Google. If you want to opt-out of this module mirror, you can turn it off by setting GOPROXY=direct.

The proxy has a clear privacy policy: https://proxy.golang.org/privacy It collects anonymized usage metrics like other package registries (rubygems.org, nuget.org, crates.io) do.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#117

Post by ipaddr »

czx4f4bd wrote: post #54
unity1001 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source projects are under financed Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago. You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features…

How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

Look at Laravel. Open source framework creates saas opportunities, conference opportunities, sponsorship opportunities.

Look at tailwinds, open source lib with saas opportunities that netted the creator millions of dollars

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#118

Post by FireInsight »

brianolson wrote: post #103

Yeah, I don't want to use the Microsoft language (C#) Certainly not the Oracle Language (Java) I like the Google Language (Go) and it's BSD so maybe safe-ish? I'm not in that ecosystem, but I'd use the Apple language (Swift) if I had to. Maybe the JetBrains language (Kotlin) is okay? I hear lots of buzz about the Mozilla language (Rust), maybe they have a good history of open source stewardship. The Guido language is…

Kotlin is not just okay, it's pretty great IMHO. Elegant and expressive, feels familiar. The only reason I only use it when I need to is JVM, and the fact that googling anything Kotlin-related brings up results android. Just answering your question^^

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#119

Post by charcircuit »

unity1001 wrote: post #113
charcircuit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So become a corporation?

I think whatever format that works would be ok, right? A cooperative, or a foundation with an attached company (a la WP foundation + Automattic etc), whatever that works would be ok.

I typoed corporation. My point was that you would become the very thing you were trying to avoid.

Re: Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

#120

Post by jeltz »

chomp wrote: post #42
ARandomerDude wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move? I haven't heard of this before (other than TFA's bare question-raising). Do you have an example?

Golang out of the box aggregates and analyzes usage metrics of modules whenever they are downloaded.

As long as they only store aggregates I cannot say that I see that issue.
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