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Comment by tl | Hacker News Reader

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?

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All of that developers work on zen would be available to the zig foundation if it were licensed GPL.

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.

and where would the money and time to pursue a lawsuit come from?

From the Zig foundation

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.

Roughly $100K-$200K maximum and it would be a good use of time if it would recover potentially millions for the foundation.

>recover potentially millions for the foundation.

You really believe a guy setting up a superficial fork in his basement has "millions" to pay out in damages?

If he doesn’t then there is little point in writing this blog post as well.

The point of the blogpost isn't to shutdown Zen, it's to ensure new people who find Zig or Zen aren't confused into thinking there is a relationship between the two.

Why would anyone think there was a relationship between the two? Nothing in Zen’s marketing mentions Zig.

I have more faith in my fellow human beings that when they do due diligence to decide whether they should pay a monthly fee to use a language, that they would do a little due diligence and look into the history and syntax of the language and see that it's a fork of Zig instead of taking marketing at face value.

By that logic, If you have faith in the due diligence of your fellow man, why would a rational person assume there is a relationship between software forks with no claim to that effect?

>why would a rational person assume there is a relationship between software forks

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.

The norm is a neutral relationship

good lord. our budget is public; you can see we have some 30K in the bank, with $3500 income per month. We will not be wasting donors' money on a lawyer.

In this specific case it may not be worth it but if a large corporation were redistributing a hypothetically GPL-licensed version of zig without releasing source, then you would be doing your donors a disservice by not seeking retribution to the foundation.

I'm a Zig donor and I disagree. I'm happy that my donations are funding development instead of lawsuits.

My point is that by funding certain lawsuits, their ROI could result in funding an order of magnitude more development

This is the purpose of the FSF as far as I understand. One of their goals is enforcement of the GPL

I believe the FSF only use their legal resources to defend software whose copyright has been assigned to them.

>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.

>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...

>>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.

Yes, there have been several successful GPL violation lawsuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits

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