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Comment by 16s | Hacker News Reader

Languages such as Go would interest me more if they were not controlled by one company. I've had bad experiences with corporate languages in the past. This is one reason I'll stick with C++. It has an ISO standard and many different compilers from different companies. I feel more in control and less likely to be shafted by Google, Oracle, Microsoft or whoever owns the language de jour.

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From replies to the parent: > a) Go is open source > By your argument, C++ is controlled by Bell Labs. > The C# specification has an ECMA and ISO standard

Oh come on, you know 16s was talking about implementations and tendencies of the parent company to engage in malevolent lawsuits trying to shut down alternatives.

Wherein an open source language, mostly developed by Company X, dies out because they stop developing it and the contributors remaining are not as good / interested. Let's not kid ourselves, open source is not magical fairy dust that does work for you. It works based on a set of personal incentives in alignment with the public good, and so sometimes it doesn't.

Same with ISO standards. They don't specify goodness. The Mono replacement for C# is finally getting there, but a few years ago, if the MS C# implementation had died off, would I replace it with Mono? God no.

Why does everyone pretend GCCGO doesn't exist in these conversations? An alternative implementation already exists, and has existed since very early on. If nothing else, it demonstrates that re-implementation is a feasible option, should that ever become necessary. (I don't see why it should, since the official is BSD licensed.)

Producing a different rabbit out of the hat that Google themselves don't use in production (from my understanding) doesn't change anything.

What does that have to do with anything? Who cares what google does or doesn't do? That is rather the point of this particular thread of discussion, in case you missed.

http://tip.golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS

> We've understood from the initial launch that Go needed to be more than just Google's language. The front page of golang.org has never mentioned Google and carries none of the Google logo or branding, and that is not accidental.

https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/ExP5BeXU...

a) Go is open source

b) Not sure why you've included Microsoft in your list. The C# specification has an ECMA and ISO standard.(ECMA-334 and ISO/IEC 23270:2006)

Java is open source too and C# is not the only corporate language from MicroSoft.

Go and the go std lib are licensed under a bsd license, which is a more liberal license than java and the jdk and would avoid things like the oracle lawsuit against android.

So yes, just because it's open source doesn't mean much, but it's open source with a very liberal license, which does mean something.

How does the BSD license avoid something like the Oracle lawsuit against Android? From my understanding it wouldn't have made a difference.

The Oracle lawsuit is based on the Java ME licensing restrictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_Java#Licencing_restric...

A pure BSD license does not have these restrictions.

Originally, the Oracle lawsuit had some patent claims in it, IIRC. They were thrown out though. I can't recall if they were thrown out by the judge or if Google spent the time/money/lawyers to get them invalidated.

Any open source language, even those not affiliated with a company, could be vulnerable to that though.

Now, in this particular case (for those who can digest legalease): http://golang.org/PATENTS

IANAL, I don't think that's true for the Apache license, because it includes a clause that explicitly reassigns patents (or at least licenses any relevant patents).

Java is open source by the completely literal meaning of this word, but it is not in the spirit of open source, i.e. it is not free software (as was recently demonstrated by Oracle's lawsuit).

It wasn't Free Software, but is now (more or less). IcedTea / Java 7, as shipped by Fedora &co, is entirely Free Software[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(software_platform)#Free_...

In case you're forgetting history, Java only went open source very recently (2007, only really usable in 2008)[0]. For much of its life, it has been a closed source language / runtime.

Nothing against Java, now, but it's not a fair comparison to Go. (Disclosure: I was an early Go contributor but no longer use it for day to day work. I have no affiliation with Google.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(software_platform)#Free_...

Another example (it's ignored far too often) is F#.

From Microsoft, open source under the Apache License for all I know. And it's one of the 3 big, supported, here to stay .Net languages, comes with full VS support etc..

By your argument, C++ is controlled by Bell Labs.

Was. It didn't see wide adoption until we had many compilers. I will ignore the standard, since the compilers did.

There are two compilers that implement the Go 1 spec independently: the original Go compiler and Gccgo, official part of the GCC.

Knowing the languages only by reputation, you could try D which is more community oriented. I kind of wish it had a backer like Google, because I like it's name better and I heard of it before Go :-) I also hate implicit semi-colons. If you don't want them, then don't have them at all, like python.

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