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FUD. - Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable? - Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw suppor

by bsg75 11y ago

FUD. - Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable? - Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw support? - Does Java, being under the control of Oracle, present a better option? - Many business are using VB, C# and F#, which Microsoft owns. F# especially could be abandoned, but it continues to find new use. The Go code I write and compile today will continue to work for a significant period of time. If Google stopped paying the committers, this would not change - the language may not evolve, but this is a minor concern on a project of Go's popularity. Some businesses still rely on COBOL and Fortran, but those are not exactly evolving either.

SeanDav 11y ago
It is not FUD. It is a factor to consider, especially if you are thinking of creating mission critical software. There is no doubt that Google has plenty of form in killing projects, some of which were quite popular and/or highly visible. After all what percentage of Google income/infrastructure depends on Go? I presume it is really, really tiny and could become a casualty in corporate politics. I personally think it is highly unlikely that Google would kill Go, but I do think one has to consider the possibility before betting the farm.
coldtea 11y ago
>FUD We're talking about decisions to adopt a language, so FUD and especially "uncertainty" is a very important factor to consider. This is not 1999 and Microsoft badmouthing Linux. >Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable? Not all of them, but a lot of them do. Especially languages. Even something like OCamL needs Jane Street and that french university a lot. Go is not setup as even a 50-50 internal/external community. While the long tail is, well, long, the majority of commits and all of the steering is from Google devs. >Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw support? Rust has Mozilla and lots of paid programmers (all the core team for one). Without it, it would have gone nowhere. Python and Ruby had had corporate sponsorship themselves too, but they have been far more organic (grass-roots) open source communities than Go from the start. >Many business are using VB, C# and F#, which Microsoft owns. F# especially could be abandoned, but it continues to find new use. Devs/Teams using F# are extremely few and far between compared to any established language such as C#, Java, etc. We're talking probably 2 orders of magnitude or more. >Some businesses still rely on COBOL and Fortran, but those are not exactly evolving either. Fortran is still evolving actually. Also Fortran and COBOL have been always mostly based on commercial compilers -- not community efforts, because that's how stuff worked back in the day. And it's not like people write green projects in COBOL -- they just rely on it because they have huge important codebases that are 40-50 years old. That's not the case with Go.
- dbaupp 11y ago
  > all the core team for one Not all (Yehuda and me, Huon), although both of us have been paid by Mozilla at some point in the past.

by bsg75 11y ago

SeanDav 11y ago

It is not FUD. It is a factor to consider, especially if you are thinking of creating mission critical software. There is no doubt that Google has plenty of form in killing projects, some of which were quite popular and/or highly visible. After all what percentage of Google income/infrastructure depends on Go? I presume it is really, really tiny and could become a casualty in corporate politics. I personally think it is highly unlikely that Google would kill Go, but I do think one has to consider the possibility before betting the farm.

coldtea 11y ago

>FUD We're talking about decisions to adopt a language, so FUD and especially "uncertainty" is a very important factor to consider. This is not 1999 and Microsoft badmouthing Linux. >Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable? Not all of them, but a lot of them do. Especially languages. Even something like OCamL needs Jane Street and that french university a lot. Go is not setup as even a 50-50 internal/external community. While the long tail is, well, long, the majority of commits and all of the steering is from Google devs. >Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw support? Rust has Mozilla and lots of paid programmers (all the core team for one). Without it, it would have gone nowhere. Python and Ruby had had corporate sponsorship themselves too, but they have been far more organic (grass-roots) open source communities than Go from the start. >Many business are using VB, C# and F#, which Microsoft owns. F# especially could be abandoned, but it continues to find new use. Devs/Teams using F# are extremely few and far between compared to any established language such as C#, Java, etc. We're talking probably 2 orders of magnitude or more. >Some businesses still rely on COBOL and Fortran, but those are not exactly evolving either. Fortran is still evolving actually. Also Fortran and COBOL have been always mostly based on commercial compilers -- not community efforts, because that's how stuff worked back in the day. And it's not like people write green projects in COBOL -- they just rely on it because they have huge important codebases that are 40-50 years old. That's not the case with Go.

dbaupp 11y ago
> all the core team for one Not all (Yehuda and me, Huon), although both of us have been paid by Mozilla at some point in the past.