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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

ziglang.org

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141–150 of 299 posts

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#141

Post by kristopher »

fastball wrote: post #118
kristopher wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

Thank-you for the question. Most of heavy lifting is in the actual compiler itself and in the vtables/trait interface feature. Although the cpp implementation now differs most, we never claimed to be a hard fork of Zig.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#142

Post by simias »

kristoff_it wrote: post #53
simias wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do admit that I find the "anti-business" citations pretty strange from the context of developing a programing language. I can understand this mindset if you're doing some work of art and don't want it corrupted by corporate drones, but for a technical tool I don't really get what could go wrong. What would a corporate sponsor of a programing language want? A clear release schedule and roadmap, stability, practicali…

There are many ways to create relationships between opensource projects and corporations. Some are sane, some are not. I can't speak for Andrew, and certainly even less for past Andrew (this is an old link), especially when quoted by somebody banned from the community. What I can say about present-day Zig, as VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, is that, to put it in simple terms, we want to take a step aw…

That sounds interesting but I'm not sure I understand what this means in practice. In particular I don't get this at all:

>In light of the consequences of Mozilla depending so much on corporate sponsorships, it almost seems weird to me that we need to clarify why we'd like to walk a different path.

I think Mozilla's funding is very unhealthy for Firefox in particular because it's a web browser and there can be a clear conflict of interest, especially when a lot of the money effectively comes from advertisers. What I want from a browser and what Google wants from a browser probably differs significantly. I want good privacy and control, Google wants me to see ads and build a profile.

But how does that translate to Zig, the programing language? For instance as far as Rust is concerned I'd argue that more corporate involvement is actually a good thing, it means that the language is here to stay. I may be naive but I don't really see the failure mode here. What I want from a programing language and what Google/Amazon/Netflix/Samsung want from a programing language probably has a lot of overlap.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#143

Post by mhh__ »

magic_quotes wrote: post #137
CyberRabbi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key takeaway for me is that 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. If zig were licensed GPL, the zig foundation would be able to sell permissive licenses to companies that don’t want to share source as a way to fundraise.

> If zig were licensed GPL, the zig foundation would be able to sell permissive licenses to companies That would be against the spirit of GPL, which is ideologically opposed to all proprietary software.

Stallman himself has said he approves of GPL/Commercial dual licensing.

It's a good way to support a project - companies don't like the GPL but they also want to spend money on support.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#144

Post by AsyncAwait »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #119
falcolas wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I agree, however it is worth noting that I don't think many maintainers consider the explicit value of copyleft these days.

I think BSD/MIT is more popular because it is simple and "less hassle", which is true but also makes it so that it is less of a hassle to be actively hostile to the project.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#145

Post by MaxBarraclough »

mouldysammich wrote: post #71
dnautics wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and where would the money and time to pursue a lawsuit come from?

This is the purpose of the FSF as far as I understand. One of their goals is enforcement of the GPL

I believe the FSF only use their legal resources to defend software whose copyright has been assigned to them.

https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/spring/copyright-assignmen...

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#146

Post by kristoff_it »

skohan wrote: post #130
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.

How close to "production ready" do you feel Zig is, especially in terms of tooling and cross-platform support? It's a super interesting language for me, but I am hesitant to invest in a language which might not be truly usable for years if ever

Hi, right now Zig is still a bit wild. If you don't feel like looking into a language that is still moving at this speed (if you read the changelogs for the last few releases you'll see what I'm talking about), then you might want to wait a little.

Zig 0.7.0 is scheduled to be released soon and the main effort is being spent on porting the current C++ compiler to a self-hosted version. Once that's done, we'll be in a much better position to provide better stability for features.

During the last fundraiser we announced the intention of launching a Zig Stability Program once the self-hosted compiler is done, so that we can guarantee that any bug found in features that we decide to support are going to be prioritized appropriately. To be clear, this is a bug stability program, not an API stability one: we'll still redesign things from one version to the next if necessary.

In terms of timelines, we hope to have the self-hosted compiler replace the current one in version 0.8.0, indicatively 6 months from now.

If you want to help speed the development up:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig to contribute

https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang (or email us at donations@ziglang.org) to donate

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#147

Post by Narishma »

gmueckl wrote: post #136
qalmakka wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is not quite true in the case of Visual Studio. There is a community edition, but it is only free under a very constrained set of circumstances (mostly company revenue < 100.000$/year, IIRC). Most business need to buy Visual Studio Professional to legally use that IDE.

How is that enforced?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#148

Post by pjmlp »

fastball wrote: post #79
tyingq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get the compiled binary into the app store? Or to end users in some other way?

Yes? Anyone can download a binary that runs on MacOS.

Not when notarization no longer can be worked around.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#149

Post by nemothekid »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #24
fengb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would GPL help? It doesn't stop hostile forks. Pretty sure the ask isn't the Zen source.

Hostile forks would not be able to keep their enhancements private, thus ensuring a reciprocal relationship.

If they were actual enhancements, I doubt the Zig Foundation would care. A company making a closed source release doesn't seem to be the point of ire here.

The issue is, another company has forked Zig, made 0, or negative enhancements, and the Zig foundation is making sure to distance itself from the fork incase anyone gets burned by Zen. You don't want the first impression of your new language to be tarnished by some commercial company who dumped everything in marketing and 0 in development.

The GPL wouldn't help in this case at all. It's very clear that the Zig Foundation doesn't care about the changes, it cares about it's reputation. On the contrary having a high quality commercial fork would probably be a good thing for Zig (see MySQL Percona, Cassandra Datastax, Postgres Citus)

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#150

Post by johnnyfaehell »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #119
falcolas wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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

I kind of agree with you and kind of disagree with you. You should be able to complain all you want. However, if explictly decide to give people certain rights when you complain about them using those rights it shouldn't hold much value. Which is what I think was the original point in the sentence you replied to.

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