> In effect, then, the current state is what the blog post suggests at the very end: final decisions about the Go language are made by the core Go team, and the core Go team all work at Google, but there is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language.
> I believe that every successful language must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group of people.
He points out that there are over 100 committers, nearly half of which are non-Google; it's only the small group of people in charge of the language spec that are at Google.
It may be true that Google the company don't drive Go the language. However, simply working in the same company tends to make you take on the perspective and values of that company.
In the Xen Project, for instance, Citrix is the largest single contributor. Citrix management have basically left the engineers working in the Xen to our own devices; but nonetheless we've made a conscious effort to diversify the organizational membership of the core decision-makers in the project: partly to make sure that we're not drifting into a Citrix-centric groupthink, and partly to avoid the appearance of Xen being a Citrix-only project.
If I were them, I would be looking for an opportunity to arrange to have at least one non-Googler on the core Go team, for the same reasons.
That's how I read the 50 or so out of 100 approvers as being Google. That means 50 (or so, can't remember the exact number..) are not Google.
When I read "Approvers", I match that in my head to "Core Team". Is there a "rank" above approvers that defines the core team?
There are 100+ people who can approve changes to the implementation; but there only a handful of people who can make changes to the language specification, and all of those people are at Google.
Should that be "the reference implementation of Go" ?
The specification mentions "implementation restriction" many times, so the Go spec writers seem to be encouraging other implementations. Besides gc, google also provide gccgo. If you download the gc source, change it a little so it still conforms to the spec, and publish, then that would be another implementation of Go. I believe there's an incomplete JS-based version of Go around as well, so if that's ever finished, that would be another implementation of Go.
no successful language-indeed, no successful free software project of any
sort is a democracy [...]
Successful languages pay attention to what people want, but to change
the language according to what most people want is, I believe, a recipe
for chaos and incoherence. I believe that every successful language
must have a coherent vision that is shared by a relatively small group
of people.
I believe too that projects "owned by the people" end like The Homer™, and I'm actually curious, as the author, about:
I would be interested to hear of a counter-exampleOn that note, I also seem to remember that LLVM/Clang are pretty democratic, but I haven't dug deeply and may be completely wrong.
Go : C++ :: Go's governance : C++'s governance
You could argue whether those are the goals a language should pursue, but it's pretty obvious a central designer with free reign would not have achieved those goals.
That's like saying that there's no meaningful sense in which I, apart from my brain and nervous system, make decisions about what my body does.
There is more to Go than Google, there is a community and it is as free as can be. But the final decision makers are at Google. It's all very well said, every open source project has a set of final decision makers and that project is theirs. Unless you work hard to become one of those decision makers the project is not yours. And perhaps it is not notable to write the blog post "this open source project ACTUALLY belongs to so-and-so."
I'm not certain, because - like I said - it's worded confusingly, but that was my impression.
I think you could say that about most teams at most companies. That doesn't mean that they have any autonomy whatsoever from their company, though.
For me, the more convincing argument is that Go would have probably happened in a parallel universe as well. Imagine that Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson had worked another company that gives the freedom to work on personal projects, it is very likely that they had come up with the same language. They have argued in talks that Go was created as an answer to problems that they identified in the development of infrastructure at Google. That may have been a trigger, but Go is firmly rooted in the tradition of C, UNIX, Plan 9, and Limbo and a logical next step in that tradition.
Hence, to me, Go is really Griesemer, Pike, Thompson, and Cox' language and not Google's language.
Of course, the title of the original article that Taylor is reacting to was a bit sensational. But I think the original point was that Go is not a language that is developed by the community, but a small set of people. Whether they are employed by Google, Facebook, Uber, or Zalando is somewhat irrelevant to this debate.
If push came to shove, and we saw a war between G and say ... Oracle, over a kind of 'programming language' ... you can be darn sure the claws will come out and it will be apparent 'who owns what' etc..
In the end it may not matter: Go is what it is, it's not set up for licensing or battle, so this all may be moot.
Nonsense. You don't even realize there is an underlying bias when you get paid by someone to do something.