This is why you always use GPL
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.
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.
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“
Just because the license allows anyone to fork it and sell it doesn’t mean that Zig is obliged to endorse it.
This is my favorite part about open source. Why are you painting it as a bad thing?
That would be against the spirit of GPL, which is ideologically opposed to all proprietary software.
It's a good way to support a project - companies don't like the GPL but they also want to spend money on support.
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.
Remember that it's not free it's about lawyer approval.
You could grant them an MIT license, I guess.
GPL does not prevent you from selling a commercial version, only from closing up the source.
Having no access to the source is to direct user determent.
Me telling you there is a cliff here, be careful does nothing to infringe on your rights to walk off that cliff.
Presumably the Zig authors prefer a world in which it is possible to maliciously use the tools under MIT, and non-malicous actors could do various things downstream that the GPL would be a barrier to, to the world in which the GPL prevents both of those things.
There is a cost to preventing harms, and people will disagree whether the cost is worth it. There are many evils in this world that I do not push for collective action to eliminate merely because I do not yet see a feasible solution that is worth the cost. That doesn't preclude me from individually speaking against those things, warning people about the pitfalls of them, and shaming those who do them.
While "freedom" is a fairly generic term (I can be free to kill you or not free to kill you), circumscribing "personal freedom" is reasonable in such situations. Many libertarians would agree that "personal freedom" is bounded by the "Harm principle" so any supposed right to shoot you without fear of reprisal would not be included in the term "personal freedom." Those same people would probably also argue that self-harm (and behavior that places one at risk of self-harm), are absolutely part of personal freedom.
Anarchists might say that "personal freedom" encompasses the right to harm others, and would argue that the repercussions would be natural; the damage to your reputation from harming others would deny you the assistance of others that could be necessary to succeed (or even survive) in the future, and it could also open you up to reprisal.
Some people argue that "personal freedom" includes all, or nearly all forms of free speech. In the US, it is generally agreed upon that defamation and incitement to riot are exceptions due to the harm principle. Many people take it further and say that allowing e.g. a KKK parade in a town should be excluded because it causes harm to the black community by fostering an environment of fear and mistrust, resulting in mental, emotional and financial harm.
I take no disrespect, and agree that a reasonable person could exclude harm to others as part of "personal freedom" I'm less convinced that harm to self isn't "personal freedom" as I think even most of those who support e.g. seatbelt laws would agree that they are a very small infringement on personal freedom in exchange for a very large public-health benefit and are knowingly making that tradeoff.
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.
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?
GPL violations are not unknown. Would Zen have really cared about breaking the license? Would legal mechanisms work fast enough to limit damage?
If it were licensed GPL and they were violating that license they could sue in the legal system instead of writing a blog post with dubious effect.
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.
You really believe a guy setting up a superficial fork in his basement has "millions" to pay out in damages?
Because many open source foundations bless commercial offerings. Having the open source foundation come out and say the commercial package is rubbish is the exception, not the norm.
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/spring/copyright-assignmen...
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.
>If it were licensed GPL and they were violating that license they could sue in the legal system instead of writing a blog post with dubious effect.
Suing isn't a good idea even if you have a case. The blog post does more with less effort.
Even if Zig and Zen were GPL the employees agreement can be structured such that his work on Zen can not be used for Zig. There's an FAQ for this sort of stuff: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DevelopChangesU...
>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/
Pretty sure the ask isn't the Zen source.
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.
“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.“
1. Why do you believe that No. 2 can make valuable contributions to Zig if you do not value his contributions to Zen?
2. Why do you believe that No. 2 would be a potential contributor to Zig if he weren’t otherwise legally restricted?
Because the project does not care for Zen's desired direction and following this direction is the form No. 2's contributions to Zen would have taken as they were a contractor to Zen.
The contributions No. 2 would make to the Zig project as an individual and independent of Zen are… unrelated to the direction Zen wants.
> 2. Why do you believe that No. 2 would be a potential contributor to Zig if he weren’t otherwise legally restricted?
Because No. 2 is the number two contributor to Zig and is actively stopped from contributing by the NCC. That's literally in the statement.
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)
IIRC the AGPL is better for this, but most GPL licenses are just blacklisted by companies; reducing the likelihood of the language catching on.