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As a “maintainer” of an open source project with a corporate backer/owner, I sympathize with Google. Changing anything, even an “obvious” bug fix, is a lot of w

As a “maintainer” of an open source project with a corporate backer/owner, I sympathize with Google. Changing anything, even an “obvious” bug fix, is a lot of work: are there tests? Do existing tests need fixing? How will this affect all existing users who may now rely on the buggy behavior? Are docs updated? Are there any legal/provenance/attribution concerns? Does this effect any internal issues or goals? Were there plans to approach the problem a different way? Is this bug worth my limited time to answer all of these questions or could I have a higher impact delivering something else? None of this is insurmountable, but I do think it explains the effort it takes to merge even a one line bug fix. At the end of the day Go is the most stable language I’ve worked with in my entire career. It’s far from perfect, but it’s unbelievable how stable it is. In 6 years of working on nomad I can count the times an upgrade caused a regression in nomad on one hand, and nomad uses a lot of Go. Coming from Java and Python (and the MS ecosystem before that) this is unreal. We just never updated Java at a previous job. Python upgrades were significant time investments and never were completed without regressions. While it would be nice to have this level of stability without googles heavy hand bureaucracy, I can’t think of an example of that happening. I think a lot of folks at Google who work on Go are trying to improve this situation, but it’s harder than any technical problem.

kapilvt 4y ago
corporate backer/owner on oss project is a bit different from a language as far as scope of users. and to wit minus java (arisen from its oak roots at a time where c/c++ were the primary alternatives), and golang, most languages don't have a corporate oss backer imo [1], at least not one in pole position over the language vs other contributors. [1] perhaps Erlang, but that seems dated as a ref to its origin versus contributions and expanded field of endeavor.
- schmichael 4y ago
  > most languages don't have a corporate oss backer imo Oh that's an interesting observation! Made me peek at the TIOBE index top 10: 1. Python - has a Foundation and is as "pure" OSS as I think something can be. 2. C - slow moving standards body 3. Java - there's a few players here but a fairly small number of corporations have outsized impact (Oracle being the most) 4. C++ - slow moving standards body 5. C# - Microsoft 6. Visual Basic - Microsoft 7. JavaScript - standards body but mostly controlled by a small number of megacorps and Mozilla 8. ASM - I guess corp owned? Hard to reason about this one. 9. PHP - Foundation (I think? I've been out of that world for decades and Zend defacto controlled it when I was in it that world) 10. SQL - slow moving standard with tons of vendor specific variation So by rough count I think we have about 30% of the top 10 controlled by either 1 or a very small number of corporate backers. 30% controlled by standards bodies, 30% by Foundations, and ...what you count ASM as. So I think it's fair to say governance by corporate backers is as popular a route for languages to take as any. (To be clear I don't mean "slow" to be a pejorative when it comes to standards bodies. If it isn't clear from my OP, I'm a big fan of slow moving languages!)

kapilvt 4y ago

corporate backer/owner on oss project is a bit different from a language as far as scope of users. and to wit minus java (arisen from its oak roots at a time where c/c++ were the primary alternatives), and golang, most languages don't have a corporate oss backer imo [1], at least not one in pole position over the language vs other contributors. [1] perhaps Erlang, but that seems dated as a ref to its origin versus contributions and expanded field of endeavor.

schmichael 4y ago
> most languages don't have a corporate oss backer imo Oh that's an interesting observation! Made me peek at the TIOBE index top 10: 1. Python - has a Foundation and is as "pure" OSS as I think something can be. 2. C - slow moving standards body 3. Java - there's a few players here but a fairly small number of corporations have outsized impact (Oracle being the most) 4. C++ - slow moving standards body 5. C# - Microsoft 6. Visual Basic - Microsoft 7. JavaScript - standards body but mostly controlled by a small number of megacorps and Mozilla 8. ASM - I guess corp owned? Hard to reason about this one. 9. PHP - Foundation (I think? I've been out of that world for decades and Zend defacto controlled it when I was in it that world) 10. SQL - slow moving standard with tons of vendor specific variation So by rough count I think we have about 30% of the top 10 controlled by either 1 or a very small number of corporate backers. 30% controlled by standards bodies, 30% by Foundations, and ...what you count ASM as. So I think it's fair to say governance by corporate backers is as popular a route for languages to take as any. (To be clear I don't mean "slow" to be a pejorative when it comes to standards bodies. If it isn't clear from my OP, I'm a big fan of slow moving languages!)