> We’ve discusses this internally and decided...
As one commenter on the PR points out, they’ve discussed it internally, now it’s time to discuss as a community, but this issue has still been closed.
I don’t have an opinion on the actual topic here, but if Google don’t want to be perceived as doing whatever they like with Go and not involving the community, then they have to at least have these discussions. Even if they come to the table with strong opinions and good reasons, keeping up the appearance of community involvement like in this issue creates a culture of Go being community driven, and right now that culture is lacking.
Google hires many Go developers, hosts all the infrastructure, etc. They've been spending millions of dollars a year for the last decade or so on the project.
A small logo at the bottom of the website doesn't seem like much to ask for.
It's not even uncommon, but some people seem to see everything Google does as some plan for world domination shrug.
As I said, I have on real opinion on this particular request. It's the culture that their response creates that is of concern to me.
A better response may have been:
"Thanks for the issue. We spent a long time talking about it and are sensitive to this concern, however it would be great to get more of an understanding of how the community feels about this. Let's leave this issue open as a place for discussion for a few weeks and revisit this once we've collected some more thoughts from the community"
Edit: this culture is not a right of the community, but it is a requirement for Google to legitimately call this "community driven". Again, not specific to this particular discussion.
"ask for" is not what's happening.
What's happening is that Google had a private discussion about it and determined the issue should be squashed before it would be discussed in the public.
To that effect, I feel the suggestion to remove Google's branding would actually be disingenuous as Google has complete control over Go and you should volunteer your time knowing that.
That would be foolish. At least some of the things that Google does are clearly just side-projects.
Is it really realistic to make every chat with a colleague into a formal, public RFC?
The way this has been handled just reinforces that Go is not a community project, but a Google project that happens to be open sourced.
Maybe, maybe not, but when the community asks for a discussion about something, a response of "too late, we already decided behind closed doors" is not one that builds a culture of the project taking community involvement seriously.
Even if a decision has already been made in private, and will not be changed (which I feel is already somewhat missing the point of a community project), at least showing openness to those discussions, taking feedback, and tracking it in public is important to build the culture that is necessary to make projects succeed like this.
Google funded its development. OSS projects do this. React has Copyright Facebook, yet I don’t see snarky PRs about scrubbing their name. Maybe Google’s logo shouldn’t be colorful?
I honestly think it's better that the logo is prominently displayed, lest people forget who actually controls the language.
Otherwise it's still Google's thing.
