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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

ziglang.org

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Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#31

Post by oneplane »

drchickensalad wrote: post #9
pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of commercial compilers available. Embedded platforms, Apple (100€£$/year), Windows, PGI/CUDA, IBM/xlc,game consoles,....

Almost all of those you're forced to use because there's no/little competition that runs on the hardware, or it's an alternative compiler for a popular language (piggybacking on what OP described)

On top of that, you are only going to use those when you have to release on their platform using their tools and their publishing systems. You can just as easily run your own code, compiled by your own compiler. That said, some of those would be in a bit of a grey area considering that you would have to hack/jailbreak all of those consoles and handhelds etc.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#32

Post by johnnycerberus »

All this drama reminds me of the business culture of Japan, building walls around their gardens, growing stuff with seeds from public parks while having unethical work policies for gardeners.

The entire problem of Japan is that they specialized in perfecting what others invent, which can only take you so far.

If companies want to fork Zig and distribute it commercially in such an early stage, then Zig is doing something right.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#33

Post by CyberRabbi »

kristoff_it wrote: post #26
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.

As the author of the statement, I disagree. Parent poster got it right: the license is MIT precisely to allow the highest degree of freedom. Companies that want to profit from Zig are welcome to do so, but in this particular case, we consider connectFree a bad actor and so we crossed the language barrier to make sure Japanese developers would be able to hear from both sides.

From the statement:

    “We can’t in good conscience recommend to Japanese professionals and businesses to make their livelihood depend on a closed-source, superficial rebranding of Zig“
Does the zig foundation have a problem with recommending closed-source superficial rebrandings of Zig or just from connectFree?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#34

Post by kristoff_it »

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.

While I can't speak with absolute certainty, we probably would not want to merge any "improvement" Zen made.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#35

Post by simias »

zerr wrote: post #13

Seems like legit? https://zen-lang.org/zig/

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, practicality and efficiency. Those are all positive things IMO. Unless the original author wants to maintain Zig as an ultra-experimental toy language I don't really see the problem.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#36

Post by time0ut »

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.

I feel so bad for Andrew. It must be frustrating to pour your heart into something beautiful like zig only to have this sort of thing happen. Now is a great time to sponsor the zig project on github!

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#38

Post by wolco »

bencollier49 wrote: post #28
CyberRabbi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And there's nothing to stop the current Zig team from making future releases GPL, is there? Problem solved...?

Sort of but only the new parts would fall under gpl the rest bsd.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#39

Post by hitekker »

kristoff_it wrote: post #30
clevergadget wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they had refuted the part where he had to get kicked for being a jerk :D

Can't refute that, there's a pretty explicit PR that reverted all the changes that connectFree was trying to claim ownership of :)

May I have a link to that PR?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#40

Post by CyberRabbi »

kristoff_it wrote: post #34
CyberRabbi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While I can't speak with absolute certainty, we probably would not want to merge any "improvement" Zen made.

    “Since then, “No. 2” has resigned from their position at connectFree, but won’t be able to contribute to the Zig project for some time because of a “non-compete” clause present in the contract.“
So why do you care if No. 2 is not able to work on Zig if you don’t value the contributions he’s made to Zen?
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