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Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid f

Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid for go itself?

alephnerd 3y ago
Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go. Following your example, Alphabet should open source all the weights they use in their current search algorithm as well as the algorithm itself. And extending that principle, they should also open source the machine translation model and weights Robert DeNero made for them when at Google Translate. Both of these are dumb hypotheticals but serve to point out the fact that there are loss leaders and revenue generators at each company.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  No. My point was, companies should make money from services, not software. I believe all software should have a FOSS license.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- yellowapple 3y ago
  > Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go. Hashicorp doesn't generate revenue from Terraform. (They do generate revenue from Terraform Cloud, but that's a backend for Terraform, not Terraform itself)
- systemBuilder 3y ago
  True, just like Qualcomm bought Eudora (mac) email for fame, Google started the Go project to keep Rob Pike (of UNIX fame) happy and to help their own internal SRE teams. The public "good will" and benefits to Google SRE have more than paid for their efforts to create the Go language, plus also there is some publicity and fame for Google having most of the remaining early UNIX guys on staff ...
pjmlp 3y ago
My employer pays for Visual Studio, JetBrains, Mac tax + dev license pays for XCode, Oracle, SQL Server,... I guess it is up to Google to decide how to monetize Go, or who knows, maybe some day they will put it into a foundation of sorts that should find a way to keep sponsoring its development.
jen20 3y ago
Terraform would have avoided years of stringly typed mess had it not been written in Go. I’d estimate that half the provider bugs I saw were either because of a lack of generics (and correct unwillingness to generate code), or because of casting empty interfaces. The only advantage was static binaries, which not many other languages in a usable state supported at the time. It’s not even like there was an ecosystem at the time - HC had to maintain an AWS client for Go for several years, and similarly for Azure.

Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid for go itself?

alephnerd 3y ago

Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go. Following your example, Alphabet should open source all the weights they use in their current search algorithm as well as the algorithm itself. And extending that principle, they should also open source the machine translation model and weights Robert DeNero made for them when at Google Translate. Both of these are dumb hypotheticals but serve to point out the fact that there are loss leaders and revenue generators at each company.

linuxftw 3y ago
No. My point was, companies should make money from services, not software. I believe all software should have a FOSS license.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yellowapple 3y ago
> Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go. Hashicorp doesn't generate revenue from Terraform. (They do generate revenue from Terraform Cloud, but that's a backend for Terraform, not Terraform itself)
systemBuilder 3y ago
True, just like Qualcomm bought Eudora (mac) email for fame, Google started the Go project to keep Rob Pike (of UNIX fame) happy and to help their own internal SRE teams. The public "good will" and benefits to Google SRE have more than paid for their efforts to create the Go language, plus also there is some publicity and fame for Google having most of the remaining early UNIX guys on staff ...

pjmlp 3y ago

My employer pays for Visual Studio, JetBrains, Mac tax + dev license pays for XCode, Oracle, SQL Server,... I guess it is up to Google to decide how to monetize Go, or who knows, maybe some day they will put it into a foundation of sorts that should find a way to keep sponsoring its development.

jen20 3y ago

Terraform would have avoided years of stringly typed mess had it not been written in Go. I’d estimate that half the provider bugs I saw were either because of a lack of generics (and correct unwillingness to generate code), or because of casting empty interfaces. The only advantage was static binaries, which not many other languages in a usable state supported at the time. It’s not even like there was an ecosystem at the time - HC had to maintain an AWS client for Go for several years, and similarly for Azure.