Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#91

Post by CyberRabbi » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #72

CyberRabbi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Zig foundation

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.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#92

Post by judofyr » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #33

kristoff_it wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Regardless of the legality of a thing, the foundation might of course recommend against using it. Imagine that someone wrote a shitty book (without stealing any content) which ends up as the only result on Amazon. It’s perfectly legal to release such a book and it would be sensible for the foundation to warn the Zig community about the lacking quality.

Just because the license allows anyone to fork it and sell it doesn’t mean that Zig is obliged to endorse it.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#93

Post by CyberRabbi » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #66

CyberRabbi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of this blog post suggests to me that they either don’t believe in total software freedom or they haven’t yet accepted that people will take advantage of it.

I read it a bit different, I read it as they're proud of their freedom stance, and they are just informing users about a hostile fork without even hinting at reducing their principals henceforth.

Then why do they imply in the blog post that “closed source superficial rebrandings” should be avoided by potential customers?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#94

Post by zimpenfish » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

tibbydudeza wrote: post #37

Kristopher Tate - he wrote a photo hosting competitor to Flickr way back during the Techcrunch heydays called ZOOOOMMER.

I remember the hype about how it was going to kill off Flickr - we set up graphs of how many photos were being uploaded per day to each service and ... well.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#95

Post by vesche » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

kristopher wrote: post #43

Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama! Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support. We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of fo…

Are you blind to the fact that you're causing damage & frustration to one of the coolest open-source projects to pop-up over the past 5 years?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#96

Post by turndown » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

kristopher wrote: post #43

Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama! Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support. We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of fo…

What is your statement about the fact that Zen clearly takes code from Zig post fork? Do you not find it - extremely - hypocritical that you are using thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lines of someone elses code for free while also mandating your employees enter draconian contracts? Do you think your actions will ostracize you from more communities, as has already occured with yourself and Zig?

How quickly after posting this did you regret it as a foolish midnight decision?

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#97

Post by aidenn0 » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #57

kodablah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that believe in software freedoms as fewer restrictions, you have to accept that people may take advantage of your fewer restrictions. This is the cost of giving more (beer) freedom, and you don't have to abandon your principles because of how it manifests. (this has obvious political analogies in other restriction-less freedom contexts too)

The existence of this blog post suggests to me that they either don’t believe in total software freedom or they haven’t yet accepted that people will take advantage of it.

They are warning contributors to not inadvertently sign a contract that would prevent them from contributing to Zig.

Me telling you there is a cliff here, be careful does nothing to infringe on your rights to walk off that cliff.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#98

Post by falcolas » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #90

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.

Except essentially none of the statement takes issue with the forking itself. In fact the author of the statement is active in this very thread and specifically notes that this is very much allowed and is not what they take issue with.

Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is.

The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me, no matter whether the allegations are true or not. It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work".

And yet it's really the only argument that could be made by the Zig author.

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#99

Post by wrsh07 » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #93

kodablah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it a bit different, I read it as they're proud of their freedom stance, and they are just informing users about a hostile fork without even hinting at reducing their principals henceforth.

Then why do they imply in the blog post that “closed source superficial rebrandings” should be avoided by potential customers?

Because zig is free? A marked up superficial re banding is a scam

Re: Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

#100

Post by bzb5 » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

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.

Maybe he shouldn’t have used the MIT licence if he didn’t understand what it meant. You can always hire a lawyer to explain it to you.

Excuse my cynicism but this story where someone starts a MIT or BSD licenced project so they can attract more contributors and then cry when someone makes money off the project is getting far too old.