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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before this post I never knew Zen existed. Now I know it exists and am emotionally invested in it. And there's no such thing as bad publicity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Saying that Zig’s creators should sit down and be quiet sounds both condescending and craven.
And lay off the personal attack, 'k?
It is absolutely not normal to demand copyright for code written by a developer in off-hours. It is extremely not normal to write non-compete clauses for software developers and the ban on non-compete clauses in California has been cited as a key policy promoting the growth of the software industry. And it is obviously adversarial to fork a project and then try to get developers on the project to sign non-competes saying they will not work on the project.
In the US, it's the standard. There are exceptions, but most companies will demand it. I've been bound by IP assignment contracts exactly like this for my entire career - from Oracle to a pair of startups.
> sign non-competes saying they will not work on the project.
Also, in the US, this is a long-established standard. You will not work for your competitors. Zig is a competitor for Zen.
When did fairness go out of fashion?
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?