4 ms·

What does "buy into" mean? Is there something controversial about an auto-generated source doc website?

4ad 5y ago
Godoc.org used to be an independent, open source site that Google bought just to cancel and replace with proprietary bloat that takes >10x longer to render (literally) among many other UX regressions, and won’t display documentation for except for licenses deemed acceptable by Google (in particular it rejects public domain and WTFPL). So yes, this is very controversial to some people.
- rsc 5y ago
  This is a remarkably flamey summary. I would have expected something more balanced from you. To be very clear, Google did not buy godoc.org at all. The maintainer of godoc.org tired of taking care of it and approached us about taking it over. We agreed, to ensure that this important community resource remained available. We put in significant operational time keeping it running - it was not a zero-maintenance server. When the time came to update godoc.org to support Go modules, it was clear that a lot would need to change - the old godoc code just didn't expect any of the concepts that modules added. So we wrote a new one instead of trying to evolve the old one in place, and when it was ready, we turned down the old one with appropriate redirects to keep links working. The idea that we "bought" godoc.org "just to cancel and replace" it is incredibly incendiary and not even remotely close to true. I'm stunned to see you spreading misinformation like this. As for licenses, Google has deep pockets and does not want to be sued for non-permitted use of other people's source code. Our lawyers have decided that displaying a derived work (the docs) on a commercial site (anything Google runs) is something we need an clear license for. It is not hard to make a clear statement that code is licensed to allow the specific uses that are otherwise reserved to the author in copyright law. The 0BSD and MIT-0 licenses are good examples of clear statements granting the necessary rights, with no actual restrictions on use. WTFPL is very much not that kind of clear statement: it does not explicitly grant the copyright-reserved rights. Google's lawyers do not have any interest in one day having to stand up in court and defend having made commercial use of some software by debating the exact legal meaning of 'what the fuck you want to'. It also turns out to be fairly difficult, legally, to put something in the public domain. If just saying "I put this in the public domain" were enough, the CC0 license would not be so incredibly long [1]. pkg.go.dev does recognize and display CC0-licensed code. Yes, godoc.org used to display docs for code using any license at all. That was almost certainly a mistake, one that went unnoticed during the transfer of godoc.org to Google. I'm glad that the copyright violations on that site never led to any legal action. [1] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.
  - silisili 5y ago
    I'm not who you are replying to, but am a contributor since the v1 ish days and will try to remain respectful, as I feel you usually are. It feels the main inflammatory issue pointed out is 'bought' vs 'agreed to take over.' It is an important distinction, but to the end user the result is the same. Many have lamented a noticeably degraded experience. I'm curious if the original maintainer would have agreed to such action(in fairness, it doesn't matter, just wondering). Further, many have expressed their distaste with the banner. I don't want to rehash or argue that here, and probably you don't either. FWIW, I'm just a passive observer and never argued one way or another. However, I'm not sure just ignoring folks is the right answer either. One can see how both changes could lead to a lot of dissatisfaction, I think. All of that aside, the legal issue described is a real double edged sword. It feels like G only blesses certain licenses to an end user. I have some trouble believing a company of Google's size worries about the implication of what boils down to analyzing publicly available data. Does Google check for and bless licenses in their web crawler?
    - rsc 5y ago
      As far as blessing certain licenses, I believe that we currently recognize all the OSI and SPDX licenses and display documentation for code with any license that permits commercial use. The full list is at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy. Analyzing public data is different from reproducing and distributing significant portions. The problem here is reproduction and distribution. Legally, Google's short search result snippets, which quote just a few fragments of a page, are quite different from reproducing and distributing a package's docs in their entirety. https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ is a good overview of what a license needs to do and why. I don't know what to say about the "have some trouble believing" part other than to attest that I have personally spent many hours working with (excellent, wonderful) lawyers on these issues. Google really does care about making sure we are respecting the limitations set out in people's licenses.
  - stonogo 5y ago
    You're making a big deal about "bought" but it doesn't really matter whether money changed hands. godoc.org existed, Google showed up, and now it does not. The thing that replaced it is not functionally equivalent, full stop. Whether or not someone got paid is not of interest. When Google shows up to a project, money tends to follow, so it's not really surprising that OP should make this assumption. I'll not address any of this bizarre hypothetical law interpretation, except to say that SQLite, a software package which Google ships globally, is in the public domain, always has been, and none of the things you bring up seem to matter at all anywhere except web forums, which are consistently the only place anyone sees this kind of handwaving.

4ad 5y ago

Godoc.org used to be an independent, open source site that Google bought just to cancel and replace with proprietary bloat that takes >10x longer to render (literally) among many other UX regressions, and won’t display documentation for except for licenses deemed acceptable by Google (in particular it rejects public domain and WTFPL). So yes, this is very controversial to some people.

rsc 5y ago
This is a remarkably flamey summary. I would have expected something more balanced from you. To be very clear, Google did not buy godoc.org at all. The maintainer of godoc.org tired of taking care of it and approached us about taking it over. We agreed, to ensure that this important community resource remained available. We put in significant operational time keeping it running - it was not a zero-maintenance server. When the time came to update godoc.org to support Go modules, it was clear that a lot would need to change - the old godoc code just didn't expect any of the concepts that modules added. So we wrote a new one instead of trying to evolve the old one in place, and when it was ready, we turned down the old one with appropriate redirects to keep links working. The idea that we "bought" godoc.org "just to cancel and replace" it is incredibly incendiary and not even remotely close to true. I'm stunned to see you spreading misinformation like this. As for licenses, Google has deep pockets and does not want to be sued for non-permitted use of other people's source code. Our lawyers have decided that displaying a derived work (the docs) on a commercial site (anything Google runs) is something we need an clear license for. It is not hard to make a clear statement that code is licensed to allow the specific uses that are otherwise reserved to the author in copyright law. The 0BSD and MIT-0 licenses are good examples of clear statements granting the necessary rights, with no actual restrictions on use. WTFPL is very much not that kind of clear statement: it does not explicitly grant the copyright-reserved rights. Google's lawyers do not have any interest in one day having to stand up in court and defend having made commercial use of some software by debating the exact legal meaning of 'what the fuck you want to'. It also turns out to be fairly difficult, legally, to put something in the public domain. If just saying "I put this in the public domain" were enough, the CC0 license would not be so incredibly long [1]. pkg.go.dev does recognize and display CC0-licensed code. Yes, godoc.org used to display docs for code using any license at all. That was almost certainly a mistake, one that went unnoticed during the transfer of godoc.org to Google. I'm glad that the copyright violations on that site never led to any legal action. [1] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.
- silisili 5y ago
  I'm not who you are replying to, but am a contributor since the v1 ish days and will try to remain respectful, as I feel you usually are. It feels the main inflammatory issue pointed out is 'bought' vs 'agreed to take over.' It is an important distinction, but to the end user the result is the same. Many have lamented a noticeably degraded experience. I'm curious if the original maintainer would have agreed to such action(in fairness, it doesn't matter, just wondering). Further, many have expressed their distaste with the banner. I don't want to rehash or argue that here, and probably you don't either. FWIW, I'm just a passive observer and never argued one way or another. However, I'm not sure just ignoring folks is the right answer either. One can see how both changes could lead to a lot of dissatisfaction, I think. All of that aside, the legal issue described is a real double edged sword. It feels like G only blesses certain licenses to an end user. I have some trouble believing a company of Google's size worries about the implication of what boils down to analyzing publicly available data. Does Google check for and bless licenses in their web crawler?
  - rsc 5y ago
    As far as blessing certain licenses, I believe that we currently recognize all the OSI and SPDX licenses and display documentation for code with any license that permits commercial use. The full list is at https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy. Analyzing public data is different from reproducing and distributing significant portions. The problem here is reproduction and distribution. Legally, Google's short search result snippets, which quote just a few fragments of a page, are quite different from reproducing and distributing a package's docs in their entirety. https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/license/ is a good overview of what a license needs to do and why. I don't know what to say about the "have some trouble believing" part other than to attest that I have personally spent many hours working with (excellent, wonderful) lawyers on these issues. Google really does care about making sure we are respecting the limitations set out in people's licenses.
- stonogo 5y ago
  You're making a big deal about "bought" but it doesn't really matter whether money changed hands. godoc.org existed, Google showed up, and now it does not. The thing that replaced it is not functionally equivalent, full stop. Whether or not someone got paid is not of interest. When Google shows up to a project, money tends to follow, so it's not really surprising that OP should make this assumption. I'll not address any of this bizarre hypothetical law interpretation, except to say that SQLite, a software package which Google ships globally, is in the public domain, always has been, and none of the things you bring up seem to matter at all anywhere except web forums, which are consistently the only place anyone sees this kind of handwaving.