[drcode]

As somebody that just got into Zig and loves the language, it makes me super sad that the developers on this project have to spend their valuable time stressing about BS like this.

Also, the ideas the Zen people list on their website for forking Zig are terrible ideas- They were pushing to turn Zig into a hard-to-reason-about vanilla object-oriented programming language.

[falcolas]

That's one of the costs of using the MIT and BSD licenses: anybody can take it and go private/for-profit with it (without giving back even a "thanks"), and all the author can do is issue a strongly worded statement about it.

Moreover, they can't even claim the moral high ground when writing the strongly worded statement, since they've made the explicit choice to give up any and all rights to the product.

[reitzensteinm]

> Moreover, they can't even claim the moral high ground when writing the strongly worded statement, since they've made the explicit choice to give up any and all rights to the product.

You are oversimplifying things here. One can be a bad actor while remaining perfectly legal.

Your friend has an upcoming surprise birthday party. You didn't enter in to an agreement not to tell them, so you do. Your friend group doesn't sue you in a court of law, they shun you.

It's totally OK to decide that you want your project to be MIT, and call out hostile forks operating in bad faith. You're not going to stop them, but the community can judge for themselves whether you've got a point and which fork they want to associate with.

It's OK to say: well if you made the project GPL, they couldn't do what they're doing legally.

It's not OK to say: well you didn't make your project GPL, so you don't get to complain.

[AsyncAwait]

I agree, however it is worth noting that I don't think many maintainers consider the explicit value of copyleft these days.

I think BSD/MIT is more popular because it is simple and "less hassle", which is true but also makes it so that it is less of a hassle to be actively hostile to the project.

[hitekker]

> One can be a bad actor while remaining perfectly legal.

Yep, that's exactly it. Obeying the letter of the law is not the same as following the spirit of the law. Ethicality and legality are not the same thing.

If they were the same, Zig would deserve scorn and vitriol for daring to question the character of another legal entity. After all, legal entities cannot be criticized for poor ethics because only illegal entities are unethical... right?

It's a twisted, craven worldview that we ought to be more wary of.

[johnnyfaehell]

> It's not OK to say: well you didn't make your project GPL, so you don't get to complain.

I kind of agree with you and kind of disagree with you. You should be able to complain all you want. However, if explictly decide to give people certain rights when you complain about them using those rights it shouldn't hold much value. Which is what I think was the original point in the sentence you replied to.

[reitzensteinm]

Well if you complain about a "hostile fork" that's just somebody stripping your branding and releasing a commercial fork, that should fall on deaf ears. That's in the spirit of MIT, and you've just picked your license poorly.

But what's being alleged here is actual hostility and deception. If it's true, Zig being MIT licensed in no way removes their "moral high ground" (as GP put it) to make a post like this.

[falcolas]

Here's my point of view - why does Zig even care what Zen is doing? Zen's shortcomings don't impact the userbase or development of Zig in any real fashion.

The fact that the Zig foundation wrote this letter condemning the actions of Zen's founder/employees - especially when they closed the letter with a call to action to return to Zig - shows that Zen's fork actually matters to them, that they don't believe it should remain functional.

[darthrupert]

I suppose they're doing this as a public service, so that fewer people will fall for this total scam.

[sigzero]

Because Zen is a bad actor and they want to make sure there is a clear line of demarcation between Zig and Zen.

[masklinn]

Except essentially none of the statement takes issue with the forking itself.

In fact the author of the statement is active in this very thread and specifically notes that this is very much allowed and is not what they take issue with.

[falcolas]

Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is.

The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me, no matter whether the allegations are true or not. It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work".

And yet it's really the only argument that could be made by the Zig author.

[masklinn]

> Other than encouraging Japanese users to use Zig instead of Zen, that is.

They're not encouraging users to use zig instead of zen because zen is a private fork, they're discouraging users from using zen because it is zen.

> The fact that most of the message was pointing out how poor the character of the Zen authors is doesn't feel good to me

Most of the statement has to do with Zen's dubious relationship with the truth (with the lack of significant value despite lofty claims being but one of the examples thereof).

The statement also doesn't point out the poor character of Zen's creator but their poor behaviour. You can infer poor character from poor behaviour but that is not what is pointed out in the statement.

> It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work".

You may want to re-read the statement if that's what you got from it.

[falcolas]

> they're discouraging users from using zen because it is zen.

And I quote: "we invite all Japanese developers ... to join the global Zig community and enjoy the real deal, without having to pay a single Yen for the privilege."

> doesn't point out the poor character of Zen's creator but their poor behaviour

Potato, tomato. You're correct that the specifics are different, yet the underlying message is the same: "these guys are bad, come over to Zig".

[hitekker]

It’s perfectly reasonable for an Open Source software foundation to point out how a private company is misusing their software and misappropriating their brand.

Saying that Zig’s creators should sit down and be quiet sounds both condescending and craven.

[drcode]

It's fine for Zen to fork the Zig code. It's not fine for Zen to claim authorship of code that was written by someone else (such as the async/await code)

[coldtea]

>It's an appeal to our sense of fairness, "Look at these big bad guys who are profiting off our work".

When did fairness go out of fashion?

[falcolas]

Fairness could also apply to someone taking advantage of the decision to use an MIT license, only to be publicly lambasted. Is that fair?

[coldtea]

If he's being a dick about it (e.g. splitting the community, attempting to take credit, trying to register the trademark for a name it's not his, etc), then yes.

[kazinator]

When I put the BSD license on something, I'm not condoning activity of hiring people away from working on the free version with non-competes that prevent them from contributing to the original. That's not in the scope of the license.

I think the situation could easily exist with a GPL-ed project. It seems possible to hire someone to extend the fork of some GPL-ed code base in specific ways, and use non-compete clauses to disallow any other activity with regard to that fork, or any other.

On paper, you might think that the GPL would hamper such at hing; after all, you have to release the source code. But in practice, things fall through the cracks. Someone with a fork of some GPLed code has certain customers. Those customers get access to the source code, but don't necessarily make it public. If you have key developers bound up with non-competes, and only they understand some code that only certain customers have, ... see the picture?

[dralley]

I don't know why MPLv2 doesn't get much love. It's the right blend of both hard and soft copyleft IMO.

[time0ut]

I feel so bad for Andrew. It must be frustrating to pour your heart into something beautiful like zig only to have this sort of thing happen. Now is a great time to sponsor the zig project on github!

[justin66]

> Now is a great time to sponsor the zig project on github!

Indeed.

[drcode]

Agreed, I have a donation to them in the works already.

[skohan]

How close to "production ready" do you feel Zig is, especially in terms of tooling and cross-platform support? It's a super interesting language for me, but I am hesitant to invest in a language which might not be truly usable for years if ever

[kristoff_it]

Hi, right now Zig is still a bit wild. If you don't feel like looking into a language that is still moving at this speed (if you read the changelogs for the last few releases you'll see what I'm talking about), then you might want to wait a little.

Zig 0.7.0 is scheduled to be released soon and the main effort is being spent on porting the current C++ compiler to a self-hosted version. Once that's done, we'll be in a much better position to provide better stability for features.

During the last fundraiser we announced the intention of launching a Zig Stability Program once the self-hosted compiler is done, so that we can guarantee that any bug found in features that we decide to support are going to be prioritized appropriately. To be clear, this is a bug stability program, not an API stability one: we'll still redesign things from one version to the next if necessary.

In terms of timelines, we hope to have the self-hosted compiler replace the current one in version 0.8.0, indicatively 6 months from now.

If you want to help speed the development up:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig to contribute

https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang (or email us at [e-mail]) to donate

[0xTJ]

I'm really looking forward to Zig becoming more refined. I started writing an x86 kernel, but put that on pause because of known compiler bugs.

[bzb5]

Maybe he shouldn’t have used the MIT licence if he didn’t understand what it meant. You can always hire a lawyer to explain it to you.

Excuse my cynicism but this story where someone starts a MIT or BSD licenced project so they can attract more contributors and then cry when someone makes money off the project is getting far too old.

[GordonS]

The situation is a little more nuanced than that - it's the way they are trying to make money from Zig that people find objectionable. In particular, what they are doing could damage the future of Zig and potentially splits the ecosystem. In addition, they have done some obviously scummy things like try to register a trademark on Zig in Japan.

[bzb5]

A fork is literally a split of the ecosystem.