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I'd wager that nobody would complain if Google donated Go to an open organization such as CNCF [1]. The CNCF is a good fit because it already hosts the world's

I'd wager that nobody would complain if Google donated Go to an open organization such as CNCF [1]. The CNCF is a good fit because it already hosts the world's most prominent Go projects, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. While Google is certainly a big bish in that pond, there are plenty of other big fish to balance them out, including Cisco, Red Hat/CoreOS, Github, IBM, Intel and Docker. Or invent a new organization. Call it "the Go Foundation". Make sure it's independent and has the bylaws and administrative structure to prove it. It's worked out pretty well for Python [2]. [1] https://www.cncf.io/ https://www.cncf.io/ [2] https://www.python.org/psf-landing/ https://www.python.org/psf-landing/

zaphirplane 7y ago
I kind of get what you (and the articles) are driving at. Who will be the people that run it under that umbrella? You need some community buy in and corporate buy in. Who will run it? Activists ? You want the top talent working in/on go to be the people that run it. Now if GvR (python) or equivalent was contributing to go and he is hey I’m an awesome developer and an awesome language designer what gives with side lining me. That would be a point. But now most top go talent that are working on the language are at google Just like with k8s google may create a foundation for it or donate to one of the existing one when there is diversity in top contributors. I assume hope. Perhaps this activism is early
jopsen 7y ago
If go wasn't a strongly opiniated language curated by the core team, I fear it wouldn't be the same go. Example: I don't like all the things gofmt does, but if I accept what gofmt gives me, I can learn to live with it, and eventually be super happy :) If go isn't opinionated, then what's the point? Whether owned by Google or a foundation, if the core team isn't small and opiniated, then aren't we just reinventing C++, hehe :) Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion. (I actually haven't used golang since joining Google, but that's a different story)
pron 7y ago
There are two kinds of control: control via stewardship and control via contribution. Stewardship is the process of making final decisions. That could be done by some foundation, but if it's the same people, the decisions would be the same. But even when the stewards make the final decisions about what goes in, someone has to contribute the work. For large/complex open source projects, much of the contribution comes from people who are paid to work full-time on the project, and someone has to pay their salary; that someone is often a corporation. Even if a corporation does not have direct control via stewardship, they can still decide what kind of contributions they're willing to pay their full-time engineers to work on. For example, Linux stewardship is done by a foundation, but most of the contribution is done by corporations. We see something similar in the Java world. Even though the Java stewards are mostly Oracle employees, Oracle does not exert direct control over stewardship; the OpenJDK lead is elected by the OpenJDK board (whose chairmanship is reserved for Oracle, but has non-Oracle members). However, Oracle also funds 90% of the OpenJDK contributors, and the company can decide they want to fund work in certain areas but not in others. E.g. Oracle has reduced investment on client-side Java; some of that work is now contributed by another corporation (Gluon), but the total resources for client work are still reduced. Because Google has many people working on OpenJDK (I think about the same number as those working on Go), it also has a lot of influence, as it can contribute large features (like the thread sanitizer they're now contributing). Here is an explanation of Java's governance by Mark Reinhold, who is the OpenJDK lead and also Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle: https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio

zaphirplane 7y ago

I kind of get what you (and the articles) are driving at. Who will be the people that run it under that umbrella? You need some community buy in and corporate buy in. Who will run it? Activists ? You want the top talent working in/on go to be the people that run it. Now if GvR (python) or equivalent was contributing to go and he is hey I’m an awesome developer and an awesome language designer what gives with side lining me. That would be a point. But now most top go talent that are working on the language are at google Just like with k8s google may create a foundation for it or donate to one of the existing one when there is diversity in top contributors. I assume hope. Perhaps this activism is early

jopsen 7y ago

If go wasn't a strongly opiniated language curated by the core team, I fear it wouldn't be the same go. Example: I don't like all the things gofmt does, but if I accept what gofmt gives me, I can learn to live with it, and eventually be super happy :) If go isn't opinionated, then what's the point? Whether owned by Google or a foundation, if the core team isn't small and opiniated, then aren't we just reinventing C++, hehe :) Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion. (I actually haven't used golang since joining Google, but that's a different story)

pron 7y ago

There are two kinds of control: control via stewardship and control via contribution. Stewardship is the process of making final decisions. That could be done by some foundation, but if it's the same people, the decisions would be the same. But even when the stewards make the final decisions about what goes in, someone has to contribute the work. For large/complex open source projects, much of the contribution comes from people who are paid to work full-time on the project, and someone has to pay their salary; that someone is often a corporation. Even if a corporation does not have direct control via stewardship, they can still decide what kind of contributions they're willing to pay their full-time engineers to work on. For example, Linux stewardship is done by a foundation, but most of the contribution is done by corporations. We see something similar in the Java world. Even though the Java stewards are mostly Oracle employees, Oracle does not exert direct control over stewardship; the OpenJDK lead is elected by the OpenJDK board (whose chairmanship is reserved for Oracle, but has non-Oracle members). However, Oracle also funds 90% of the OpenJDK contributors, and the company can decide they want to fund work in certain areas but not in others. E.g. Oracle has reduced investment on client-side Java; some of that work is now contributed by another corporation (Gluon), but the total resources for client work are still reduced. Because Google has many people working on OpenJDK (I think about the same number as those working on Go), it also has a lot of influence, as it can contribute large features (like the thread sanitizer they're now contributing). Here is an explanation of Java's governance by Mark Reinhold, who is the OpenJDK lead and also Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle: https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio