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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

ziglang.org

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Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#111

Post by CyberRabbi »

aidenn0 wrote: post #97
CyberRabbi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of this blog post suggests to me that they either don’t believe in total software freedom or they haven’t yet accepted that people will take advantage of it.

They are warning contributors to not inadvertently sign a contract that would prevent them from contributing to Zig. Me telling you there is a cliff here, be careful does nothing to infringe on your rights to walk off that cliff.

This is precisely my point. Why allow anyone to walk off the cliff if you’re just going to tell them it’s wrong anyway? They could have avoided all of this if it were GPL in the first place.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#112

Post by qalmakka »

pjmlp wrote: post #5
nindalf wrote: post #3

Probably the strangest part of this is a person trying to sell a paid version of a compiler. Did that person miss the boat by 30 years? All mainstream programming languages today are free and open source. Programming languages are platforms that thrive only when they're widely adopted. The community that adopts it builds the libraries and ecosystem necessary for it to be viable. You can't possibly build a new platfor…

There are plenty of commercial compilers available. Embedded platforms, Apple (100€£$/year), Windows, PGI/CUDA, IBM/xlc,game consoles,....

Apple's and Microsoft's compilers are downloadable for free (Apple's is actually Clang), they're not forcing you to pay if you want to use them; even the IDEs have been free for a while without any kind of payment or subscription.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#113

Post by drcode »

falcolas wrote: post #98
masklinn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except essentially none of the statement takes issue with the forking itself. In fact the author of the statement is active in this very thread and specifically notes that this is very much allowed and is not what they take issue with.

Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is. The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me, no matter whether the allegations are true or not. It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work". And yet it's really the only argument that could be made by the Zig auth…

It's fine for Zen to fork the Zig code. It's not fine for Zen to claim authorship of code that was written by someone else (such as the async/await code)

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#114

Post by masklinn »

falcolas wrote: post #98
masklinn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except essentially none of the statement takes issue with the forking itself. In fact the author of the statement is active in this very thread and specifically notes that this is very much allowed and is not what they take issue with.

Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is. The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me, no matter whether the allegations are true or not. It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work". And yet it's really the only argument that could be made by the Zig auth…

> Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is.

They're not encouraging users to use zig instead of zen because zen is a private fork, they're discouraging users from using zen because it is zen.

> The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me

Most of the statement has to do with Zen's dubious relationship with the truth (with the lack of significant value despite lofty claims being but one of the examples thereof).

The statement also doesn't point out the poor character of Zen's creator but their poor behaviour. You can infer poor character from poor behaviour but that is not what is pointed out in the statement.

> It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work".

You may want to re-read the statement if that's what you got from it.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#115

Post by fastball »

kristoff_it wrote: post #60
kristopher wrote: post #43

Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama! Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support. We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of fo…

Can you explain why you're attempting to register a "ZIG" trademark in Japan? https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF... (for people that can't read japanese: click the "english" link on the top right for a translation) (edit: fixed link, I pasted another trademark registration by connectfree by mistake)

I think the link is still wrong... I'm seeing an application for the "ＳｉＦｉｖｅ" mark.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#116

Post by kristopher »

0xTJ wrote: post #69
drcode wrote: post #10

As somebody that just got into Zig and loves the language, it makes me super sad that the developers on this project have to spend their valuable time stressing about BS like this. Also, the ideas the Zen people list on their website for forking Zig are terrible ideas- They were pushing to turn Zig into a hard-to-reason-about vanilla object-oriented programming language.

I'm really looking forward to Zig becoming more refined. I started writing an x86 kernel, but put that on pause because of known compiler bugs.

Which ones? Chances are that Zen has them fixed.

We have a unikernel under Zen that we sell and had to revamp how packed structs were handled.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#117

Post by ModernMech »

pfraze wrote: post #59
ModernMech wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a third party is able to use thousands of manhours of someone else’s labor as a basis for their closed source product without having to share their enhancements or pay a dime. This is my favorite part about open source. Why are you painting it as a bad thing?

There's a difference between using open-source in your work and doing a superficial fork & rebrand. The latter is clearly trying to steal the upside from the creator of the code.

Of course there is a difference, but again that's what I love about open source. You put something out there, and then it has a life of its own. So what if some people come along and try to sell your code with a new name? Good luck to them, I hope they become very rich off my code (are there any examples of this actually happening?). Personally I write open source code because I like writing open source code, not to get rich.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#118

Post by fastball »

kristopher wrote: post #108
turndown wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your statement about the fact that Zen clearly takes code from Zig post fork? Do you not find it - extremely - hypocritical that you are using thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lines of someone elses code for free while also mandating your employees enter draconian contracts? Do you think your actions will ostracize you from more communities, as has already occured with yourself and Zig? How quickly…

Sorry, but I was a top contributor to Zig when we forked it. What did you contribute? No regrets, by the way -- conversation is important.

You were the 5th top contributor, which isn't much considering the actual top contributor (Andrew Kelley) still accounts for 60% of commits, even years after your fork "at 0.3".

Speaking of the fork at v0.3, in your response you forgot to address the claim that Zen has lifted changes almost wholesale made to Zig post-0.3. You'd think if Connectfree was doing all this heavy-lifting (as you seem keen to claim), it would be the other way around, no?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#119

Post by reitzensteinm »

falcolas wrote: post #81
drcode wrote: post #10

As somebody that just got into Zig and loves the language, it makes me super sad that the developers on this project have to spend their valuable time stressing about BS like this. Also, the ideas the Zen people list on their website for forking Zig are terrible ideas- They were pushing to turn Zig into a hard-to-reason-about vanilla object-oriented programming language.

That's one of the costs of using the MIT and BSD licenses: anybody can take it and go private/for-profit with it (without giving back even a "thanks"), and all the author can do is issue a strongly worded statement about it. Moreover, they can't even claim the moral high ground when writing the strongly worded statement, since they've made the explicit choice to give up any and all rights to the product.

> Moreover, they can't even claim the moral high ground when writing the strongly worded statement, since they've made the explicit choice to give up any and all rights to the product.

You are oversimplifying things here. One can be a bad actor while remaining perfectly legal.

Your friend has an upcoming surprise birthday party. You didn't enter in to an agreement not to tell them, so you do. Your friend group doesn't sue you in a court of law, they shun you.

It's totally OK to decide that you want your project to be MIT, and call out hostile forks operating in bad faith. You're not going to stop them, but the community can judge for themselves whether you've got a point and which fork they want to associate with.

It's OK to say: well if you made the project GPL, they couldn't do what they're doing legally.

It's not OK to say: well you didn't make your project GPL, so you don't get to complain.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#120

Post by falcolas »

masklinn wrote: post #114
falcolas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is. The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me, no matter whether the allegations are true or not. It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work". And yet it's really the only argument that could be made by the Zig auth…

> Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is. They're not encouraging users to use zig instead of zen because zen is a private fork, they're discouraging users from using zen because it is zen . > The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me Most of the statement has to do with Zen's dubious relationship with the…

> they're discouraging users from using zen because it is zen.

And I quote: "we invite all Japanese developers ... to join the global Zig community and enjoy the real deal, without having to pay a single Yen for the privilege."

> doesn't point out the poor character of Zen's creator but their poor behaviour

Potato, tomato. You're correct that the specifics are different, yet the underlying message is the same: "these guys are bad, come over to Zig".

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