171–180 of 299 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
since you have instead settled on forking as the zen PL, which is your right to do, would you turn that trademark over to the zig foundation as a show of good faith?
Our communication with the ZSF seems to be on the rocks. If they can communicate politely, this could be possible. The ZSF has my email address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The fact that the Zig foundation wrote this letter condemning the actions of Zen's founder/employees - especially when they closed the letter with a call to action to return to Zig - shows that Zen's fork actually matters to them, that they don't believe it should remain functional.
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.
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…
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 th…
Some of the wording there sounds petty. "whose founder uses flawed technical arguments" rubs me the wrong way. Like "The science on this is settled and everyone who ever disagreed should be personally discredited" kind of thing.
Having said that, I don't know why would anyone sane tie their codebase to a closed source language owned by some random company. I don't understand why Zig Foundation even bothers with this - seems like it is just giving publicity to something that has little to none chance of gaining market traction anyway.
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 th…
If they aren't complying with that, then they're in violation of the MIT license. Further, by removing Andrew's copyright and claiming his work as their own, that runs afoul of copyright law independent of any software licensing considerations (e.g. the reason we're told to use an actual permissive license instead of declaring things "public domain"; things don't work that way in all jurisdictions).
If that is the case, legal action is warranted.
Edit: nanny's response is correct; compliance with MIT is a very low bar that seems to be satisfied. I still question the legality of their copyright claims.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 clea…
For the Zig programming language, it means that the commercial entity that supports the project is the Zig Software Foundation, a non-profit company. Being non-profit means that we don't have shareholders nagging the board of directors for dividends, nor we have a VC company forcing decisions on us to pursue a hockey stick.
Right now we depend on donations and we are accountable to the community through the restrictions and duties that 501(c)(3) non-profits have.
If at one point we decide that the donation business model doesn't work out, we'll think of something else, but at least we'll be free from pressure that would potentially compromise the quality of the final product (i.e. Zig and its community).
To VCs and other investors that might be reading: we're not against VC money, but we're not a tech startup. If you decide to invest in Zig, it's because you have a strategical interest in having succeed one of the most energy-efficient programming languages ever created.
We're happy to take donations, exchange logos and be vocal about our appreciation for your support, but the only terms we're going to accept are: X money for 0 shares and 0 board seats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That sort of licence is not helpful. It would be unenforceable in practice and run afoul of DFSG and similar and prevent inclusion into distros.
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…
This is a great point. One unfortunate mark of success is attracting bad actors, because it implies you have something with enough value to be worth exploiting.