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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

ziglang.org

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Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#211

Post by kristoff_it »

dpc_pw wrote: post #176

MIT license allows it, so where's the problem. It's like people who support freedom of speech, and then cry anytime someone used it to say something they don't like. 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…

See the top-level comment from a Japanese developer. Language barriers and arbitrage are real things.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#213

Post by crdrost »

jlarocco wrote: post #195
CyberRabbi wrote: post #151

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.

Is it necessary to go through all that work to re-license, though? I don't see the problem with how they're handling it now. The person in question is free to use the code and be an asshole. Everybody else is free to call him out for it.

So in general yes, if you don’t have copyright assignment it is a lot of work to relicense. But that is not necessarily the case here... things like the MIT license (which ziglang uses) are often so permissive that you can relicense them as GPL.

With that said this sort of thing can result in mass contributor exoduses. One might prefer an in-between license like a per-file copyleft as you see in the Mozilla Public License, which is still GPL-compatible but does not put the full onus of the GPL on the software, solving this problem in a more narrow way (connectFree has to keep their proprietary software separate from ziglang when combining the two together, which forces them to be much more transparent about their value-add—things which they cannot keep separate need to be contributed back upstream).

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#214

Post by nanny »

klyrs wrote: post #177
rainfall wrote: post #166

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…

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or portions of the Software. 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 lic…

They are complying, the original Zig license is at the bottom of the file lib/zen/std/LICENSE (complete with "Copyright (c) 2019 Andrew Kelley"). I just downloaded it from the Zen website, and the tarball is dated 2020-09-04.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#215

Post by 1980phipsi »

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.

Can you dual license with both GPL and MIT (or other)? Would that make sense?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#216

Post by otterlicious »

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.

The compilers can be downloaded for free by anyone as part of the Build Tools for Visual Studio.

These restrictions only apply to the Visual Studio IDE.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#217

Post by dnautics »

dpc_pw wrote: post #176

MIT license allows it, so where's the problem. It's like people who support freedom of speech, and then cry anytime someone used it to say something they don't like. 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…

If we take the claims of zig at face value, then it seems quite a bit of their frustration is around the mistreatment of one of their valued contributors. That alone would seem like worth complaining about; and the rest of the stuff establishes a pattern of misbehaviour.

If all of this is true, I'm glad this gets attention in hn - so that the community as a whole can have insight into what happens sometimes in our subcommunities and know what to look out for.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#218

Post by nanny »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #175
rainfall wrote: post #166

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…

IANAL, but to your point about the copyright notices: I suspect that the license may not require you to retain the notices, but that doesn't mean that you can "take" the copyright. Copyright is associated with authorship and can't be taken by mere declaration. I could publish a copy of Shakespeare's works on my website, and I could put "(c) My Name 2020" at the top, but that would not confer actual copyright ownershi…

You have it backwards. The MIT/Expat does required you to retain a copyright notice (in the form of a copy of the license, not in the form of file headers), which Zen does. In addition, creating a derivative work does in fact give you copyright on the new work. The Shakespeare comparison does not apply because Shakespeare is not licensed under the MIT/Expat license.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#219

Post by Google234 »

tyingq wrote: post #75
masklinn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple (100€£$/year) The compiler is not commercial and does not require a developer account.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#220

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

nanny wrote: post #218
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but to your point about the copyright notices: I suspect that the license may not require you to retain the notices, but that doesn't mean that you can "take" the copyright. Copyright is associated with authorship and can't be taken by mere declaration. I could publish a copy of Shakespeare's works on my website, and I could put "(c) My Name 2020" at the top, but that would not confer actual copyright ownershi…

You have it backwards. The MIT/Expat does required you to retain a copyright notice (in the form of a copy of the license, not in the form of file headers), which Zen does. In addition, creating a derivative work does in fact give you copyright on the new work. The Shakespeare comparison does not apply because Shakespeare is not licensed under the MIT/Expat license.

> MIT/Expat does required you to retain a copyright notice (in the form of a copy of the license, not in the form of file headers)

OK, but I was talking about the file headers. :)

> In addition, creating a derivative work does in fact give you copyright on the new work

Sure, but the new work is the portions that you've changed, not the portions that you've copied, right?

"The derivative work cannot be an uncreative variation on the pre-existing work or it would simply be a copy of the pre-existing work . . . " from here: https://bit.ly/3c21Yul

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