251–260 of 346 posts
"They don't necessarily have the freedom to call that forked language "Go" (I'm not sure), but I think that limitation is OK; it serves nobody to call different projects by the same name. " Oh, the irony
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest. I would not accept “just trust me” as a response. As long as there’s a possible conflict of interest, there will be ethical concerns.
> This situation feels similar to the need of politicians to divest any potential conflicts of interest. With the key difference being that you can use a different language and achieve the same results you want. You can't just pick a different government.
A very well written piece by Ian Lance Taylor. If you don't want to read it all, he summarizes it here: > In effect, then, the current state is what the blog post suggests at the very end: final decisions about the Go language are made by the core Go team, and the core Go team all work at Google, but there is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language.
“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It” —- Google employee’s defenses of Go Even if it is theoretically true that Go is open source, by employing the majority of the Core Go team, Google exercises extensive soft power over Go. All of the defenses of Go seem to gloss over this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I think the other key argument is here: > I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people. He points out that there are over 100 committers, nearly half of which are non-Google; it's only the small group of people in charge of the language spec that are at Google. It may be true that Google the company don't drive Go the language. How…
> If I were them, I would be looking for an opportunity to arrange to have at least one non-Googler on the core Go team, for the same reasons. That's how I read the 50 or so out of 100 approvers as being Google. That means 50 (or so, can't remember the exact number..) are not Google. When I read "Approvers", I match that in my head to "Core Team". Is there a "rank" above approvers that defines the core team?
There are 100+ people who can approve changes to the implementation; but there only a handful of people who can make changes to the language specification, and all of those people are at Google.
Honestly, I'm very confused by all this. Don't like it, fork it no? Isn't that the whole point of open source? Any project needs to have a certain set of people in charge of making actual decisions and working on those. You'll never have every single user be a part of that decision making. It wouldn't scale. What language is not driven by a handful of decision maker? Even what could be argued to be committee driven l…
> As I said, that is my opinion, but I think it's true. I would be interested to hear of a counter-example.
Debian is 1000+ developers with a constitution and voting system.
So if it isn't Google's language, does it mean i can go and make my own compiler for it, call it -say- "Crinus Go" (to differentiate it from Google's Go but still point out that it is an implementation of Go) and not worry about Google coming after me?
Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle. If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-…
$10M per year would be closer, actually. (Source: public git logs for all core Go repos in past year, look for google.com or golang.org emails, multiply by typical Google salaries, which you can find on various sites.)
I'd be surprised if Ian Lance Taylor, Russ Cox and Rob Pike are making less than a million dollars a year each. They're all L8+, and even by that standard they're notably famous/distinguished/respected.
Everyone's upset that Go is Google's language, but no one would have adopted it if it weren't. It's not enough to have a cool idea for a language, even if your cool idea is not to put any new cool ideas in the language. You have to be Mozilla, or Google, or someone it seems in order to convince people this language is for real and will be supported for many years to come, and will have a healthy ecosystem. If I had m…
What about Ruby?
Granted, this support was perhaps more cultural than corporate. There's something to be said for a community that grows in your own backyard, has significant documentation in your native language(s), etc.