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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

ziglang.org

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161–170 of 299 posts

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#161

Post by raphlinus »

I just want to say that I really admire and support what Zig is trying to do here. It takes guts to try to launch an ecosystem from a fun hobby to something that can be used in production and hopefully sustain its contributors. They're not there yet, but it looks like they may well be on that journey.

This thing looks very unpleasant, but hopefully it conveys the message that Zig is potentially valuable. Figuring out how to fund such a project and organize the community is a hard problem, and again I wish them well in finding a good path.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#162

Post by trevor-e »

pjmlp wrote: post #14
chriseidhof wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's Xcode is a free download, the Swift compiler is open source. However, to become an "official" developer on the Apple platforms and publish apps you do need a paid developer account.

Hence commercial.

I'm writing a Swift project right now on my Windows computer using WSL, not paying anything to Apple...

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#163

Post by AndyKelley »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #91
dnautics wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's laughable. How much do you suppose it would cost to hire an international lawyer to pursue a case in a foreign country. Even if there were enough resources, do you think that the stakeholders in the Zig Foundation would consider that to be a reasonable use of the funds that they've donated? I certainly wouldn't. As a donor, as far as I can tell, this is as good as they could do. I'm much happier that they spen…

Roughly $100K-$200K maximum and it would be a good use of time if it would recover potentially millions for the foundation.

good lord. our budget is public; you can see we have some 30K in the bank, with $3500 income per month. We will not be wasting donors' money on a lawyer.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#164

Post by reitzensteinm »

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #150
reitzensteinm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well if you complain about a "hostile fork" that's just somebody stripping your branding and releasing a commercial fork, that should fall on deaf ears. That's in the spirit of MIT, and you've just picked your license poorly.

But what's being alleged here is actual hostility and deception. If it's true, Zig being MIT licensed in no way removes their "moral high ground" (as GP put it) to make a post like this.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#165

Post by hitekker »

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'…

> One can be a bad actor while remaining perfectly legal.

Yep, that's exactly it. Obeying the letter of the law is not the same as following the spirit of the law. Ethicality and legality are not the same thing.

If they were the same, Zig would deserve scorn and vitriol for daring to question the character of another legal entity. After all, legal entities cannot be criticized for poor ethics because only illegal entities are unethical... right?

It's a twisted, craven worldview that we ought to be more wary of.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#166

Post by rainfall »

As a Japanese-speaking software engineer, I found that the company, connectFree, did too many suspicious acts as below:

- They are attempting to register "ZIG" [1] and "SiFive" [2] as trademarks in Japan. Only this is enough for me to see them as a trademark troll.

- Since Zen is a fork, Zen comes with Zig's (or its derived version of) standard library, but when they copied Zig's library source files, they removed the original copyright notice from each file header and replaced with "Copyright (c) 2018-2020 kristopher tate & connectFree Corporation." Sure, because it's MIT license, you can relicense, but is replacing the original copyright notice OK? Even if it's OK, why did they do that?

- I once attended a meetup where the CEO of connectFree, Kristopher, gave a presentation about Zen. He gave many reasons to use Zen, but most of them were Zig's features. Until someone pointed out in the meeting, Kristopher didn't mention or even imply that Zen is a fork of Zig. Many of my friends didn't actually know until this statement was made that Zen is a fork of Zig.

- connectFree recently published license terms for Zen (perhaps only in Japanese), and in the license they claimed that you are required to obtain a paid license to distribute a program even in the source code form as long as the program is written in Zen. I can't believe that you are able to force it, and it looks like Kristopher retracted the license later, but at least they tried to do that once. And you still need to buy a license to distribute a program in binary form if it's written in Zen and compiled with connectFree's Zen compiler.

[1] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF... [2] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A7...

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#167

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

mhh__ wrote: post #143
magic_quotes wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It's a good way to support a project

I disagree. GPL/Commercial dual licensing is always a game of perverse incentives. Even if you aren't actively crippling the free part of your product you're incentivised to make it difficult enough to work with or otherwise support that companies will be inclined to pay you to do it.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#168

Post by ocdtrekkie »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #151
aidenn0 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the back and forth seems to be Andrew, et al: "you're being an asshole" Kristopher: "we're not doing anything illegal" Which to an outsider just reads like a tacit admission of being an asshole.

If being an asshole is something the Zig community does not want people to do with its code, why not just license Zig in such a way to prevent this type of usage of its code? They already implement a code of conduct to restrict behavior in their community.

Because then it wouldn't be open source. The open source definition prohibits developers from placing a lot of arbitrary license restrictions. One of the examples of this is that Gab, an alt-right site, now uses Mastodon, a platform written and used largely by a pretty far-left community.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#169

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #27
tl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the story at face value: Zen lied to customers and the community, hired a developer away from Zig, and that developer cannot work on Zig now due to an NDA. GPL violations are not unknown. Would Zen have really cared about breaking the license? Would legal mechanisms work fast enough to limit damage?

All of that developers work on zen would be available to the zig foundation if it were licensed GPL. If it were licensed GPL and they were violating that license they could sue in the legal system instead of writing a blog post with dubious effect.

Has anyone ever perused legal action based on a GPL violation? Last I checked, even the biggest piece of GPL software in existence, the Linux kernel, gets its violated without legal repercussions.
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