Re 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.
The 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.
As 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.
“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?
Regardless 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.
It’s fine for the foundation to recommend against certain companies, but it’s inconsistent to recommend against any specific company on the basis of it being “closed source superficial rebrand” if they claim to have no issue with people using their code on those terms.
> 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?
There'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.
Of 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.
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.
Maybe, the idea is that a company who wants to use my work can either comply with the GPL and give back that way or financially support the project (and therefore not need to comply).
For 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)
> For those that believe in software freedoms as fewer restrictions, you have to accept that people may take advantage of your fewer restrictions.
This argument has never made sense. "The software is more free because you can impose restrictions on the way it's used." It's more of an attempt to rationalize than a concern about the freedom of the software.
To paraphrase Stallman on the topic of permissive Free Software licences:
Some people prefer permissive Free Software licences, and feel that copyleft licences like the GPL introduce unwelcome restrictions. I don't understand this objection. They're unhappy that the licence doesn't grant the power to deny other people their freedom?
The 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.
I 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.
This is precisely my point. Why allow anyone to walk off the cliff if you’re just going to tell them it’s wrong anyway? They could have avoided all of this if it were GPL in the first place.
I do not mean this disrespectfully but isn’t that taking the idea of “personal freedom” to absurdity? I believe in personal freedom as well but I don’t think walking off a cliff or maliciously using someone Else’s labor is freedom.
Taking 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?
>>All of that developers work on zen would be available to the zig foundation if it were licensed GPL.
>False. the changes and the license only need to be extended to Zen's customers. They don't need to be provided back to Zig.
Zen makes their system available for free download to the public, thus would be forced to provide source to the public. https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/download/
Has anyone ever perused legal action based on a GPL violation? Last I checked, even the biggest piece of GPL software in existence, the Linux kernel, gets its violated without legal repercussions.
that'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.
If they were actual enhancements, I doubt the Zig Foundation would care. A company making a closed source release doesn't seem to be the point of ire here.
The issue is, another company has forked Zig, made 0, or negative enhancements, and the Zig foundation is making sure to distance itself from the fork incase anyone gets burned by Zen. You don't want the first impression of your new language to be tarnished by some commercial company who dumped everything in marketing and 0 in development.
The GPL wouldn't help in this case at all. It's very clear that the Zig Foundation doesn't care about the changes, it cares about it's reputation. On the contrary having a high quality commercial fork would probably be a good thing for Zig (see MySQL <-> Percona, Cassandra <-> Datastax, Postgres <-> Citus)
“Since then, “No. 2” has resigned from their position at connectFree, but won’t be able to contribute to the Zig project for some time because of a “non-compete” clause present in the contract.“
So why do you care if No. 2 is not able to work on Zig if you don’t value the contributions he’s made to Zen?
Maybe they believe that No. 2 is capable of making valuable contributions, but that the specific contributions made at the direction of the Zen founder aren’t valuable.
If 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.
A 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.
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.