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I'll explain why there's a EULA and write another comment for the rest At the point that it was clear we're going to have a usable compiler I asked my entire t

I'll explain why there's a EULA and write another comment for the rest At the point that it was clear we're going to have a usable compiler I asked my entire team what license we should release this under. Absolutely everyone had a problem with each and every open source license. The more we talk the more apparent that none of us wanted to wake up one day to find out a trillion dollar (possibly cloud related) company took our code and want to compete with us. We don't want embrace, extend, and extinguish to happen to this project if we could help it. So we settled on a EULA (which very likely will change at 1.0) that says you can learn for free which lets face it, is the only thing people would want to do in its present state

bogota 4y ago
I get where your coming from but do you have an example of this happening for a programming language? I can’t think of any language that a company tried to extend and was successful with it. Its not a SaaS offering so the value add is very low for a company to try and take over development.
samatman 4y ago
Figuring out a license is in the set of bare minimums I would look for in evaluating a language. I mean no offense in saying this, but I give a team which can't come to an accord on this basic thing very low odds of getting a language to 1.0. The language field is very crowded. I'm all about new languages, I wish each and every one success and yours is no exception. If it's going to succeed, you'll have to beat people over the head with it. The current situation won't reach escape velocity. Good luck.
artemonster 4y ago
Why do you think someone would bother to steal your code? Is this that revolutionary or are you delusional?
- levodelellis 4y ago
  Usually I don't reply to rude comments but why would someone bother to steal zig and call it zen? https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch04-defer-errdefer/ https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch04-defer-errdefer/
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    No idea. As someone learning Zig currently and finding it quite pleasant, it disappoints me to see that happening. But I guess it depends on what your goals are. If you want this language to be used by as many people as possible, you want to remove any obstacles to that, and a sign-up wall is a big one. You also have to consider the competition. I can go to my package manager and download compilers and runtimes for probably over 200 languages right now without having to submit any information about myself - I did it for Zig the other day. If your language and compiler are so mind-blowing that I should be glad to subject myself to the friction I have to go through to use yours instead, you really need to sell that to me with more than, as mentioned in another subthread, a promise of ambiguous features not found in other languages. So free your code. Sell it to me as much as possible on the web site with all of its amazing capabilities and features and libraries. And if some company rips it off and passes it off as their own thing, make hay from it - write up a blog post about how the nasty big evil company stole the work of a plucky li'l FOSS team, but you're just going to keep plugging away and improving your code regardless. Then post it to HN. You'll get updoots through the roof and plenty of sympathetic new eyes on the project.
  - quelltext 4y ago
    They seem to have a good write up to explain that: https://zen-lang.org/zig/ https://zen-lang.org/zig/ Also: forking /= stealing
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      You may want to check out the official statement [1] from the Zig foundation as well. Even though forking is not necessarily stealing, what they have done seems more accurately described as stealing. [1] https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming-language/ https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481142 )
xavdid 4y ago
Because you can change your license over time, you could release < 1.0 versions under a non-commercial license. See answers here (and in the linked duplicate question): https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-sou... Especially in a pre-production state, it's unlikely that anyone will want to use this commercially anyway. It'll eliminate a big barrier to any adoption you're hoping to get.
dangus 4y ago
> you can learn for free which lets face it, is the only thing people would want to do in its present state Deciding to learn something in the first place is a question of how I want to use my limited time. I don't think I want to learn something with a presently-bad EULA that might change arbitrarily in the future. It's totally fine that your team wants to keep this project close to you, it is your work and copyright privileges after all. You don't have to be open source if you don't want to. [1] Don't let anyone tell you what to do with your own work. Just don't be surprised when you find that nobody's interested in it. [1] I do think it's a bit hypocritical to require people to be "a part of the community" to download the thing when the license doesn't resemble a community or copyleft license. This is no different than downloading from the Oracle Download Center.

bogota 4y ago

I get where your coming from but do you have an example of this happening for a programming language? I can’t think of any language that a company tried to extend and was successful with it. Its not a SaaS offering so the value add is very low for a company to try and take over development.

samatman 4y ago

Figuring out a license is in the set of bare minimums I would look for in evaluating a language. I mean no offense in saying this, but I give a team which can't come to an accord on this basic thing very low odds of getting a language to 1.0. The language field is very crowded. I'm all about new languages, I wish each and every one success and yours is no exception. If it's going to succeed, you'll have to beat people over the head with it. The current situation won't reach escape velocity. Good luck.

artemonster 4y ago

Why do you think someone would bother to steal your code? Is this that revolutionary or are you delusional?

levodelellis 4y ago
Usually I don't reply to rude comments but why would someone bother to steal zig and call it zen? https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch04-defer-errdefer/ https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch04-defer-errdefer/
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  No idea. As someone learning Zig currently and finding it quite pleasant, it disappoints me to see that happening. But I guess it depends on what your goals are. If you want this language to be used by as many people as possible, you want to remove any obstacles to that, and a sign-up wall is a big one. You also have to consider the competition. I can go to my package manager and download compilers and runtimes for probably over 200 languages right now without having to submit any information about myself - I did it for Zig the other day. If your language and compiler are so mind-blowing that I should be glad to subject myself to the friction I have to go through to use yours instead, you really need to sell that to me with more than, as mentioned in another subthread, a promise of ambiguous features not found in other languages. So free your code. Sell it to me as much as possible on the web site with all of its amazing capabilities and features and libraries. And if some company rips it off and passes it off as their own thing, make hay from it - write up a blog post about how the nasty big evil company stole the work of a plucky li'l FOSS team, but you're just going to keep plugging away and improving your code regardless. Then post it to HN. You'll get updoots through the roof and plenty of sympathetic new eyes on the project.
- quelltext 4y ago
  They seem to have a good write up to explain that: https://zen-lang.org/zig/ https://zen-lang.org/zig/ Also: forking /= stealing
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    You may want to check out the official statement [1] from the Zig foundation as well. Even though forking is not necessarily stealing, what they have done seems more accurately described as stealing. [1] https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming-language/ https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481142 )

xavdid 4y ago

Because you can change your license over time, you could release < 1.0 versions under a non-commercial license. See answers here (and in the linked duplicate question): https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-sou... Especially in a pre-production state, it's unlikely that anyone will want to use this commercially anyway. It'll eliminate a big barrier to any adoption you're hoping to get.

dangus 4y ago

> you can learn for free which lets face it, is the only thing people would want to do in its present state Deciding to learn something in the first place is a question of how I want to use my limited time. I don't think I want to learn something with a presently-bad EULA that might change arbitrarily in the future. It's totally fine that your team wants to keep this project close to you, it is your work and copyright privileges after all. You don't have to be open source if you don't want to. [1] Don't let anyone tell you what to do with your own work. Just don't be surprised when you find that nobody's interested in it. [1] I do think it's a bit hypocritical to require people to be "a part of the community" to download the thing when the license doesn't resemble a community or copyleft license. This is no different than downloading from the Oracle Download Center.