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Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language
- CyberRabbi 6y agoThis is why you always use GPL
- pjmlp 6y agoIndeed, no tears dropped here.
- Dork1234 6y agoRe branding a MIT license software and selling a commercial version is a good thing if done correctly. Clearly Zen is not providing any added value. The key takeaway from this is you don't sign contracts with overly aggressive business executives. I also think Non-competes should be almost completely banned for most employees.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoThe 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.
- kristoff_it 6y agoAs 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.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoFrom 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?
- dnautics 6y agodid you read the description of what happened?
- CyberRabbi 6y agoYes
- dnautics 6y agothen I submit that your rhetorical question at the end of your statement is flawed. Maybe consider the question: Does zig have a problem with closed-source rebrandings by companies that cause serious damage to the ecosystem outside of merely forking the code?
- CyberRabbi 6y agoIt was not flawed nor rhetorical, if their concern is with ecosystem damage, then the fact that the company makes a closed source superficial rebrand should have no bearing on that. Unless they indeed have a problem with companies profiting from Zig.
- judofyr 6y agoRegardless 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.
- ModernMech 6y ago> 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. This is my favorite part about open source. Why are you painting it as a bad thing?
- pfraze 6y agoThere's a difference between using open-source in your work and doing a superficial fork & rebrand. The latter is clearly trying to steal the upside from the creator of the code.
- ModernMech 6y agoOf course there is a difference, but again that's what I love about open source. You put something out there, and then it has a life of its own. So what if some people come along and try to sell your code with a new name? Good luck to them, I hope they become very rich off my code (are there any examples of this actually happening?). Personally I write open source code because I like writing open source code, not to get rich.
- magic_quotes 6y ago> If zig were licensed GPL, the zig foundation would be able to sell permissive licenses to companies That would be against the spirit of GPL, which is ideologically opposed to all proprietary software.
- mhh__ 6y agoStallman himself has said he approves of GPL/Commercial dual licensing. It's a good way to support a project - companies don't like the GPL but they also want to spend money on support.
- magic_quotes 6y agoFSF isn't vehemently opposed to permissive licenses either (they are merely discouraged), but that is the argument GP decided to bring here.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago> It's a good way to support a project I disagree. GPL/Commercial dual licensing is always a game of perverse incentives. Even if you aren't actively crippling the free part of your product you're incentivised to make it difficult enough to work with or otherwise support that companies will be inclined to pay you to do it.
- mhh__ 6y agoNot necessarily - the GPL is a no-go for some companies regardless of the difference in quality between the free and not free. Remember that it's not free it's about lawyer approval.
- 1980phipsi 6y agoCan you dual license with both GPL and MIT (or other)? Would that make sense?
- mhh__ 6y ago
- AsyncAwait 6y ago> Re branding a MIT license software and selling a commercial version is a good thing if done correctly. GPL does not prevent you from selling a commercial version, only from closing up the source. Having no access to the source is to direct user determent.
- mStreamTeam 6y agoMost programmers would benefit by stepping out of their bubble and learning more about the business and legal side of their work
- tl 6y agoTaking the story at face value: Zen lied to customers and the community, hired a developer away from Zig, and that developer cannot work on Zig now due to an NDA. GPL violations are not unknown. Would Zen have really cared about breaking the license? Would legal mechanisms work fast enough to limit damage?
- CyberRabbi 6y agoAll of that developers work on zen would be available to the zig foundation if it were licensed GPL. If it were licensed GPL and they were violating that license they could sue in the legal system instead of writing a blog post with dubious effect.
- dnautics 6y agoand where would the money and time to pursue a lawsuit come from?
- CyberRabbi 6y agoFrom the Zig foundation
- dnautics 6y agothat'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 spend their money on code, and leave it at a statement that can grab attention, like what they have done.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoRoughly $100K-$200K maximum and it would be a good use of time if it would recover potentially millions for the foundation.
- fengb 6y agoHow would GPL help? It doesn't stop hostile forks. Pretty sure the ask isn't the Zen source.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoHostile forks would not be able to keep their enhancements private, thus ensuring a reciprocal relationship.
- bencollier49 6y agoAnd there's nothing to stop the current Zig team from making future releases GPL, is there? Problem solved...?
- wolco 6y agoSort of but only the new parts would fall under gpl the rest bsd.
- a-nikolaev 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken, if all code authors agree on the license change, then, the new release can be made fully GPL. While the old copy will be still available as MIT. A malicious actor can pretend that they merged MIT parts with new GPL parts, but I think, it would not take a lot of time, until such merging would become technically hard, and the code can be effectively converted into GPL. However, since Zen's guy was a contributor, it's probably not possible to get all authors' permission to change the license for the entire Zig codebase.
- kristoff_it 6y agoWhile I can't speak with absolute certainty, we probably would not want to merge any "improvement" Zen made.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
- kodablah 6y agoFor 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)
- CyberRabbi 6y agoThe 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.
- kodablah 6y agoI 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.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoThen why do they imply in the blog post that “closed source superficial rebrandings” should be avoided by potential customers?
- wrsh07 6y agoBecause zig is free? A marked up superficial re banding is a scam
- aidenn0 6y agoThey 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.
- 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- YorickPeterse 6y agoA language licensed as the GPL likely would not see any users, as programs built on it would link to it (or at least parts of it, such as the standard library); thus requiring either an exception clause, or that all software using the language also be licensed as GPL. IIRC the AGPL is better for this, but most GPL licenses are just blacklisted by companies; reducing the likelihood of the language catching on.
- pjmlp 6y agoLike GCC and Linux, total failure trying to cater for users, while FreeBSD rules.
- nindalf 6y agoProbably the strangest part of this is a person trying to sell a paid version of a compiler. Did that person miss the boat by 30 years? All mainstream programming languages today are free and open source. Programming languages are platforms that thrive only when they're widely adopted. The community that adopts it builds the libraries and ecosystem necessary for it to be viable. You can't possibly build a new platform with a high barrier to entry if you're competing with established platforms where the barrier to entry is next to nothing.
- pjmlp 6y agoThere are plenty of commercial compilers available. Embedded platforms, Apple (100€£$/year), Windows, PGI/CUDA, IBM/xlc,game consoles,....
- simias 6y agoThey generally sell you an ecosystem though, and are often tied to specific hardware, not "just" a language. The only examples that come to mind of a "pure" commercial compiler, not tied to a particular environment or piece of hardware are the Comeau C++ compiler (defunct for well over a decade) and arguably the original D compiler (although I don't know if it qualifies as proprietary, just not open source). Swift as well, although it was open sourced relatively quickly.
- mhh__ 6y agoThe D compiler is now completely open source. It was always source available, but Walter wrote the backend when he was at a different company and he was able to use it but because of copyright it couldn't be open sourced as per se. Symantec signed off on it a few years ago, it's been Boost licensed ever since.
- drchickensalad 6y agoAlmost 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)
- drcode 6y agoAs 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.
- time0ut 6y agoI 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!
- 0xTJ 6y agoI'm really looking forward to Zig becoming more refined. I started writing an x86 kernel, but put that on pause because of known compiler bugs.
- kristopher 6y agoWhich ones? Chances are that Zen has them fixed. We have a unikernel under Zen that we sell and had to revamp how packed structs were handled.
- ziddoap 6y agoI can't help but feel slimey on your behalf. You're ignoring or hand-waving the questions asked of you in this thread, in order to attempt to convert a sale, in a thread about the poor behavior of Zen. Ugh.
- zerr 6y agoSeems like legit? https://zen-lang.org/zig/ https://zen-lang.org/zig/
- clevergadget 6y agoI wish they had refuted the part where he had to get kicked for being a jerk :D
- kristoff_it 6y agoCan't refute that, there's a pretty explicit PR that reverted all the changes that connectFree was trying to claim ownership of :)
- mhd 6y ago> We cannot see a future for Zig where the founder does not allow corporate entities to use and support Zig Honestly, that's one of the most important reason I'm looking favorably at Zig. And D.
- simias 6y agoI 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.
- JamesCoyne 6y agoCan someone please explain why Zen/Zip is focused on Japan? I feel I might be missing some context.
- azhenley 6y agoconnectFree, the company selling Zen, is a Japanese company: https://connectfree.co.jp/ https://connectfree.co.jp/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- johnnycerberus 6y agoAll 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.
- fomine3 6y agoPlease don't think this is standard on Japanese OSS scene. Zen's origin and owning company was not well known until now. Now it is thought as BS also on Japanese community.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoKristopher Tate - he wrote a photo hosting competitor to Flickr way back during the Techcrunch heydays called ZOOOOMMER.
- zimpenfish 6y agoI 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.
- kristopher 6y agoHello 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 formal role. Regarding commercializing compilers: our main market is in embedded and as others have pointed out, charging for compilers and support is not uncommon. One of our big main differences between Zig is that Zen natively supports vtables and traits that we call interfaces[1]. Although our core market is in Japan, we are preparing our English website and hope to have it out soon. On a more personal note, I am happy that Zig is growing and that they got the foundation together. At the peak before the fork, I was the 5th largest contributor to Zig, so I am very happy to hear when people say that they are enjoying the language. It's midnight in Japan, but I will try to field questions if any. [0] https://zen-lang.org/zig/ https://zen-lang.org/zig/ [1] https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/ https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/
- xtian 6y agoCan you share your justification for non-compete clauses in employment contracts as well as contracts which take ownership of employee work done outside work hours?
- justin66 6y agoDude... what are you even doing?
- badsectoracula 6y agoAsking money for a compiler, the audacity!
- hitekker 6y agoCan you explain why you were banned from Zig?
- deleted 6y ago
- pfraze 6y agoSomething which people don't always recognize about open source is how "value-capture" works for creators. FOSS eschews direct monetization (selling licenses to the core product) based on an ethical premise (it's unfairly limiting to end-users) and/or a business premise (the ecosystem is a key to the value prop and licenses would slow down the ecosystem growth). None of that means that the creator isn't capturing value. You capture social credibility and market awareness which you can convert in a variety of ways, including monetarily (by selling complementary products/services, by donation models, or by getting a job that you might not have had the career-credentials to get otherwise). As an aside to elaborate on this point: a lot of the recent debate about paying FOSS maintainers has to do with projects which realized all the potential social value-capture, and left creators with an externality of maintenance. Intuitively, I think people understand that forking and rebranding a project without a really strong motivation can be scummy, but I don't think people can verbalize why. This is why: you're attempting to steal the upside which the creator is the in the process of capturing. And FWIW, anybody saying that a blogpost is weak action and you ought to be going to court is ignoring that, when the value you're capturing is reputation, then public discourse is the tool you want to be using to manage it.
- aidenn0 6y agoAlso the back and forth seems to be Andrew, et al: "you're being an asshole" Kristopher: "we're not doing anything illegal" Which to an outsider just reads like a tacit admission of being an asshole.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoIf being an asshole is something the Zig community does not want people to do with its code, why not just license Zig in such a way to prevent this type of usage of its code? They already implement a code of conduct to restrict behavior in their community.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoBecause then it wouldn't be open source. The open source definition prohibits developers from placing a lot of arbitrary license restrictions. One of the examples of this is that Gab, an alt-right site, now uses Mastodon, a platform written and used largely by a pretty far-left community.
- person_of_color 6y agoQn. Why do you think providing a compiler/support for a totally unproven language (for embedded) is a good business model?!
- raphlinus 6y agoI just want to say that I really admire and support what Zig is trying to do here. It takes guts to try to launch an ecosystem from a fun hobby to something that can be used in production and hopefully sustain its contributors. They're not there yet, but it looks like they may well be on that journey. This thing looks very unpleasant, but hopefully it conveys the message that Zig is potentially valuable. Figuring out how to fund such a project and organize the community is a hard problem, and again I wish them well in finding a good path.
- munificent 6y ago> This thing looks very unpleasant, but hopefully it conveys the message that Zig is potentially valuable. This is a great point. One unfortunate mark of success is attracting bad actors, because it implies you have something with enough value to be worth exploiting.
- rainfall 6y agoAs a Japanese-speaking software engineer, I found that the company, connectFree, did too many suspicious acts as below: - They are attempting to register "ZIG" [1] and "SiFive" [2] as trademarks in Japan. Only this is enough for me to see them as a trademark troll. - Since Zen is a fork, Zen comes with Zig's (or its derived version of) standard library, but when they copied Zig's library source files, they removed the original copyright notice from each file header and replaced with "Copyright (c) 2018-2020 kristopher tate & connectFree Corporation." Sure, because it's MIT license, you can relicense, but is replacing the original copyright notice OK? Even if it's OK, why did they do that? - I once attended a meetup where the CEO of connectFree, Kristopher, gave a presentation about Zen. He gave many reasons to use Zen, but most of them were Zig's features. Until someone pointed out in the meeting, Kristopher didn't mention or even imply that Zen is a fork of Zig. Many of my friends didn't actually know until this statement was made that Zen is a fork of Zig. - connectFree recently published license terms for Zen (perhaps only in Japanese), and in the license they claimed that you are required to obtain a paid license to distribute a program even in the source code form as long as the program is written in Zen. I can't believe that you are able to force it, and it looks like Kristopher retracted the license later, but at least they tried to do that once. And you still need to buy a license to distribute a program in binary form if it's written in Zen and compiled with connectFree's Zen compiler. [1] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF75D797BF8A8562102A23936240FF60A15248A6D91AF8F8F1D741CC24A962DD/40/ja https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF... [2] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A707749AD6C41F384D8CED6C08A74E7898E52A3D0239F66CE1A12E89F0D927DB/40/ja https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A7...
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoIANAL, but to your point about the copyright notices: I suspect that the license may not require you to retain the notices, but that doesn't mean that you can "take" the copyright. Copyright is associated with authorship and can't be taken by mere declaration. I could publish a copy of Shakespeare's works on my website, and I could put "(c) My Name 2020" at the top, but that would not confer actual copyright ownership of the work on me. It would simply be an incorrect assertion.
- jhardy54 6y agoRelevant: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/3ca4925709ac6369391eb40616de33051e0bb1f1 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/3ca4925709ac6369391eb4...
- mkeedlinger 6y agoAlso relevant concerning the "No 5" contributor, Mr. Tate: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1530 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1530 That link is what the statement references as a sign of Mr. Tate's "flawed technical arguments". I'll admit I'm an outsider and a bit ignorant except for having read the linked issue, but it seems like Tate was reasonable and respectful, and that what seemed like an interesting technical discussion was shut down pre-maturely. Other contributors also said as much. Again, I'm somewhat ignorant, but seems like some brash and stifling behaviour from a project seeking technical correctness. And then the commit linked above? Immature. I'll be steering clear. edit: to be clear, I'm not siding with Tate. Just commenting on the only negative behavior I see.
- dpc_pw 6y agoMIT license allows it, so where's the problem. It's like people who support freedom of speech, and then cry anytime someone used it to say something they don't like. Some of the wording there sounds petty. "whose founder uses flawed technical arguments" rubs me the wrong way. Like "The science on this is settled and everyone who ever disagreed should be personally discredited" kind of thing. Having said that, I don't know why would anyone sane tie their codebase to a closed source language owned by some random company. I don't understand why Zig Foundation even bothers with this - seems like it is just giving publicity to something that has little to none chance of gaining market traction anyway.
- kristoff_it 6y agoSee the top-level comment from a Japanese developer. Language barriers and arbitrage are real things.
- dnautics 6y agoIf we take the claims of zig at face value, then it seems quite a bit of their frustration is around the mistreatment of one of their valued contributors. That alone would seem like worth complaining about; and the rest of the stuff establishes a pattern of misbehaviour. If all of this is true, I'm glad this gets attention in hn - so that the community as a whole can have insight into what happens sometimes in our subcommunities and know what to look out for.
- wtetzner 6y ago> MIT license allows it, so where's the problem. It's like people who support freedom of speech, and then cry anytime someone used it to say something they don't like. You can support freedom of speech and still publicly disagree with what people say. Freedom of speech says that people should not be silenced, not that they can't be disagreed with.
- mathgladiator 6y agoThis looks like a complete mess. Are there examples in today's market where a business can depend on a new programming language? I'm curious because I'm writing a programming language, and I'd love to turn it into a business. edit: add "new" to programming language
- A-Train 6y agoThere are multiple companies who are dependent on a programming language. Jane Street has adopted ocaml as the main language - they are the part of the ecosystem by now with many "core" libraries they created. RStudio is depending on R.
- forgotpwd16 6y agoThe most popular new programming languages (of the recent decade) are backed up by major corporations (Kotlin, Swift) or improve something (Elm, Julia) or both (Rust, TypeScript). So if you design a programming language attempt to improve something that will make your language stand out.
- kazinator 6y agoMassive Streisand effect here. The Zig project should just completely ignore this. There is no way this Zen thing is going to go anywhere. Nobody in their right mind would pay for anything of the sort in the year 2020. Come on, "a licensing model for the Zen compiler that requires software developers to buy a yearly subscription to distribute compiled releases of their code". That has to be a joke?
- bogwog 6y agoI wonder why they decided to go with the MIT license rather than GPL or something similar. Choosing GPL would protect the project from situations like this, attract more contributors, and have no impact on commercial usage of the language itself.
- spiritplumber 6y agofor great justice. take off every zig
- networkimprov 6y agoI'm sad to hear that the Zig community is burdened by this. I've filed a couple proposals there, and hope to use it post 1.0. But what a PR opportunity! Here's an outfit selling Zig (because it's good enough already), which won't even hit 1.0 for "two years" \o/ ("Two years" is from Andrew on a recent podcast.)
- nromiun 6y agoI don't understand why the Zig developers are getting so stressed over this. So a company forked your open source project. If you are worried about closed source forks use GPL. If you are worried that people will confuse Zig with Zen just post a warning. Honestly, I don't understand why they are comparing source code and dragging three people into it.
- tandr 6y agoBecause as @rainfall pointed out [1], the company has tried to trademark Zig, in essence putting a hand over the whole project? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483162
- nromiun 6y agoSorry. I was posting after just reading the blog. It didn't say anything about trademarks.