8th – A secure, cross-platform, concatenative programming language
8th-dev.com
8th-dev.com
"Except as otherwise specifically permitted in this Agreement, you may not: [...] (h) publish any results of benchmark tests run on the Software to a third party without Licensor’s prior written consent"
So we know that it's slow as crap, which is especially problematic given the author's claims of suitability for embedded development, and the author also thinks that nobody's going to notice. (What's next, an NDA to get the proposed license?) There's not a big enough cup to hold all the nope.
Ask Oracle customers, they are tied by the same prohibition.
There are clear pathological cases that probably wouldn't hold up in court either. What if a software contract says that you must turn over your first born child? I image that the software company would have to provide some very good reasons for including such a clause.
So, how far can a license actually go?
* I see many claims of "cross-platform", but not a lot of substance to back it up. The FAQ is odd as well - it makes many claims that are simply not true.
* Given that you chose to keep the source closed, what guarantees will I have that your language will continue to be supported if the company collapses?
* What are you offering in a paid language that isn't already provided by an open alternative?
* What is the state of the standard library or library ecosystem? Will I end up writing my own dependencies?
Edit: Prior discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10344891
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3nthud/the_8th...
https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html
And eight pillars:
https://8th-dev.com/about8th.html
There's also a very detailed manual, that for some reason is hard to find on the website:
I'm afraid to ask how the paid encryption works.
(I have not yet looked at these to form an opinion of them. I was just attempting to answer OP's question.)
Digia actually.
Nice to see the Factor repo is still getting commits.
>The main reason 8th is not GPL licensed is that I (Ron) have strong philosophical objections to being forced to give away my intellectual property. I disagree with the very tenet that "code should be free" in the GPL sense. Instead, I am of the opinion that you are free to have access to the 8th source code if you are willing to pay for that privilege. If not, not.
>A secondary reason we do not follow the "open source" idea is that, frankly, over the many years we have used open-source projects, we have been struck by the simple fact that a great many of those projects are maintained only to the extent the author decides to do so. Thus for example, the venerable "gcc" compiler has severe bugs which were reported many years ago, but which will probably never be fixed. This, despite the fact that the code for it is available and anyone could fix it at will. Nobody has, probably nobody will -- because the gcc code is extraordinarily difficult to grok. So the "many eyes" argument for open-source and GPL is not overly convincing to me.
It looks like this really just identifies that "hard problems are hard", ignores any actual benefits, and incorrectly projects that onto a "license problem". Anyone is free to license how they like, but this isn't a strong argument for that.
also, having seen that philosophy essentially kill qi/shen, I am sceptical of it as a general approach. might work for some niches like game dev.
Poplog - a hydra of Common Lisp, Standard ML, Prolog, and POP-11. Late 1980's, early 1990's, it seemed like it could change the world. With dreams of riches, it was kept closed source and commercial. It made a few million... and is dead and forgotten. Gotta wonder what the world might be like now, if they'd chosen glory over riches.
Whether developers have the right to the source is debatable. But personally, I wouldn't stake the life of my projects on a language (or database) whose life depends on one entity and their business model. And it seems to me that others feel the same way, and that the trends are toward OSS - .NET went open source, Oracle is giving way to PostgreSQL, Azure now supports Linux, etc.
Non-sequitar. If you used the GPL, you'd be doing so voluntarily, so you wouldn't be being "forced" to do anything.
> a great many of those projects are maintained only to the extent the author decides to do so
An issue that is even more pronounced with closed source software, where _all_ such projects are maintained only to the extent the author decides to do so.
I'm sure this company will be maintained only to the extent the company can stay alive.
Reva Forth always seemed nice but I could never get it working on anything other than Windows.
As such, I have little faith that "8th" will place any value on portability either, e.g., that it will be ported to BSD, Plan 9 or other RPi-compatible OS.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of more portable, open source Forths to choose from.
Example:
ftp -4o cforthu.zip https://codeload.github.com/pahihu/cforthu/zip/master
The author discloses that 8th depends on a number of third party libraries. Would this mean that each of those third parties would also have to make similar security claims to 8th?
For example, 8th uses an HTML5 parsing library from Google called gumbo-parser.
"Non-goals:
Security. Gumbo was initially designed for a product that worked with trusted input files only. We're working to harden this and make sure that it behaves as expected even on malicious input, but for now, Gumbo should only be run on trusted input or within a sandbox. Gumbo underwent a number of security fixes and passed Google's security review as of version 0.9.1."
source: https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
It may be the case the only input parsed by 8th is trusted or "within a sandbox" but without the source code how would this be verified?
It is a clear case of the license hampering the adoption of an otherwise good idea (JSX is so commonplace now, Opa had it already in 2010). But you are right, the actual close source era of Opa was very short.
#11 is Delphi/Object Pascal.
MATLAB.
Not much else.
https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/vblang
Because of FPC, arguably, if you use Delphi you're not exactly stuck in the unlikely event that it dies since in the worst case there is Free Pascal to move to, LCL and Lazarus (although I have no idea how it compares to modern late 2010s era Delphi and RAD Studio but it's at least something). Delphi also has a more or less proven track record, costs a lot, is pretty much enterprise tier item and has a multi million company behind it.
I'd argue Object Pascal is not a closed language but a language that has few implementations, one major open one (FPC) and one major closed one (Delphi) and that the situation is even better than C# vs. Mono was, since Mono had a murky legal/patent situation (or maybe it was FUD, I'm not too into C#) and the situation was basically 'closed language with a closed implementation that happens to have an open implementation' while FPC and Delphi are more like brothers with Delphi not 'owning' the concept of Object Pascal in itself nor any patents that could threaten it in any way AFAIK.
i would wager that c# standardizing it's specifications (over ten years ago) and having an open-source implementation (mono) was a big deal, and moving toward rosalyn was certainly a strategic move.