- They are attempting to register "ZIG" [1] and "SiFive" [2] as trademarks in Japan. Only this is enough for me to see them as a trademark troll.
- Since Zen is a fork, Zen comes with Zig's (or its derived version of) standard library, but when they copied Zig's library source files, they removed the original copyright notice from each file header and replaced with "Copyright (c) 2018-2020 kristopher tate & connectFree Corporation." Sure, because it's MIT license, you can relicense, but is replacing the original copyright notice OK? Even if it's OK, why did they do that?
- I once attended a meetup where the CEO of connectFree, Kristopher, gave a presentation about Zen. He gave many reasons to use Zen, but most of them were Zig's features. Until someone pointed out in the meeting, Kristopher didn't mention or even imply that Zen is a fork of Zig. Many of my friends didn't actually know until this statement was made that Zen is a fork of Zig.
- connectFree recently published license terms for Zen (perhaps only in Japanese), and in the license they claimed that you are required to obtain a paid license to distribute a program even in the source code form as long as the program is written in Zen. I can't believe that you are able to force it, and it looks like Kristopher retracted the license later, but at least they tried to do that once. And you still need to buy a license to distribute a program in binary form if it's written in Zen and compiled with connectFree's Zen compiler.
[1] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF... [2] https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A7...
If they aren't complying with that, then they're in violation of the MIT license. Further, by removing Andrew's copyright and claiming his work as their own, that runs afoul of copyright law independent of any software licensing considerations (e.g. the reason we're told to use an actual permissive license instead of declaring things "public domain"; things don't work that way in all jurisdictions).
If that is the case, legal action is warranted.
Edit: nanny's response is correct; compliance with MIT is a very low bar that seems to be satisfied. I still question the legality of their copyright claims.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights [2] http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail_main?id=2... (Copyright Act of Japan) Subsection 2 Moral Rights of Authors (Articles 18 to 20)
It explicitly does.
The file headers don't matter to the MIT/Expat license, what matters is that the original copy of the license is included in the redistribution, which it is (it's at the bottom of lib/zen/std/LICENSE). Replacing the file headers makes sense in this context because the derivative work is now (correctly) copyrighted by connectFree. Zen looks to be in total compliance with the original Zig MIT/Expat licensing terms.
Apache says something about "retaining category A header licenses" but not sure what category A means.
Also, the ideas the Zen people list on their website for forking Zig are terrible ideas- They were pushing to turn Zig into a hard-to-reason-about vanilla object-oriented programming language.
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.
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.
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?
Zig 0.7.0 is scheduled to be released soon and the main effort is being spent on porting the current C++ compiler to a self-hosted version. Once that's done, we'll be in a much better position to provide better stability for features.
During the last fundraiser we announced the intention of launching a Zig Stability Program once the self-hosted compiler is done, so that we can guarantee that any bug found in features that we decide to support are going to be prioritized appropriately. To be clear, this is a bug stability program, not an API stability one: we'll still redesign things from one version to the next if necessary.
In terms of timelines, we hope to have the self-hosted compiler replace the current one in version 0.8.0, indicatively 6 months from now.
If you want to help speed the development up:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig to contribute
https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang (or email us at donations@ziglang.org) to donate
Excuse my cynicism but this story where someone starts a MIT or BSD licenced project so they can attract more contributors and then cry when someone makes money off the project is getting far too old.
Embedded platforms, Apple (100€£$/year), Windows, PGI/CUDA, IBM/xlc,game consoles,....
The only examples that come to mind of a "pure" commercial compiler, not tied to a particular environment or piece of hardware are the Comeau C++ compiler (defunct for well over a decade) and arguably the original D compiler (although I don't know if it qualifies as proprietary, just not open source). Swift as well, although it was open sourced relatively quickly.
The compiler is not commercial and does not require a developer account.
Not a compiler, but the same idea.
An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) one million U.S. dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues, and “affiliates” means those entities that control (via majority ownership), are controlled by, or are under common control with an organization."
None of that means that the creator isn't capturing value. You capture social credibility and market awareness which you can convert in a variety of ways, including monetarily (by selling complementary products/services, by donation models, or by getting a job that you might not have had the career-credentials to get otherwise). As an aside to elaborate on this point: a lot of the recent debate about paying FOSS maintainers has to do with projects which realized all the potential social value-capture, and left creators with an externality of maintenance.
Intuitively, I think people understand that forking and rebranding a project without a really strong motivation can be scummy, but I don't think people can verbalize why. This is why: you're attempting to steal the upside which the creator is the in the process of capturing.
And FWIW, anybody saying that a blogpost is weak action and you ought to be going to court is ignoring that, when the value you're capturing is reputation, then public discourse is the tool you want to be using to manage it.
I can also share that my own role at the ZSF has as ultimate goal of increasing the total amount of effort spent on Zig.
The core problem with what kristate is doing is that, in a moment where the Zig community needs community members to take initiative and build things around Zig, and where likewise there's a tremendous potential for those individuals to capture a good chunk of value for themselves, all while making the pie bigger, he instead chose to cut a slice and run away with it for what amounts to pure vanity.
Right now we are trying to encourage people to start thinking about building a business around Zig, be it programming in Zig, or writing a Zig programming book, or whatever. I personally started https://zig.show before coming on board and I plan for my own, independent, Zig-related activity to become my main source of income one day.
If you add on top of that, that the guy creating this useless fork has a history of offering a free wifi service that steals personal information and rewrites amazon affiliate links, then you can see why we want to put as much distance as we can. For context: https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/496423.html
Andrew, et al: "you're being an asshole"
Kristopher: "we're not doing anything illegal"
Which to an outsider just reads like a tacit admission of being an asshole.
They already implement a code of conduct to restrict behavior in their community.
This thing looks very unpleasant, but hopefully it conveys the message that Zig is potentially valuable. Figuring out how to fund such a project and organize the community is a hard problem, and again I wish them well in finding a good path.
This is a great point. One unfortunate mark of success is attracting bad actors, because it implies you have something with enough value to be worth exploiting.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the ask isn't the Zen source.
IIRC the AGPL is better for this, but most GPL licenses are just blacklisted by companies; reducing the likelihood of the language catching on.
Some of the wording there sounds petty. "whose founder uses flawed technical arguments" rubs me the wrong way. Like "The science on this is settled and everyone who ever disagreed should be personally discredited" kind of thing.
Having said that, I don't know why would anyone sane tie their codebase to a closed source language owned by some random company. I don't understand why Zig Foundation even bothers with this - seems like it is just giving publicity to something that has little to none chance of gaining market traction anyway.
You can support freedom of speech and still publicly disagree with what people say. Freedom of speech says that people should not be silenced, not that they can't be disagreed with.
If all of this is true, I'm glad this gets attention in hn - so that the community as a whole can have insight into what happens sometimes in our subcommunities and know what to look out for.
That link is what the statement references as a sign of Mr. Tate's "flawed technical arguments". I'll admit I'm an outsider and a bit ignorant except for having read the linked issue, but it seems like Tate was reasonable and respectful, and that what seemed like an interesting technical discussion was shut down pre-maturely. Other contributors also said as much.
Again, I'm somewhat ignorant, but seems like some brash and stifling behaviour from a project seeking technical correctness. And then the commit linked above? Immature.
I'll be steering clear.
edit: to be clear, I'm not siding with Tate. Just commenting on the only negative behavior I see.
Come on, "a licensing model for the Zen compiler that requires software developers to buy a yearly subscription to distribute compiled releases of their code". That has to be a joke?
The entire problem of Japan is that they specialized in perfecting what others invent, which can only take you so far.
If companies want to fork Zig and distribute it commercially in such an early stage, then Zig is doing something right.
Honestly, that's one of the most important reason I'm looking favorably at Zig. And D.
What would a corporate sponsor of a programing language want? A clear release schedule and roadmap, stability, practicality and efficiency. Those are all positive things IMO. Unless the original author wants to maintain Zig as an ultra-experimental toy language I don't really see the problem.
I can't speak for Andrew, and certainly even less for past Andrew (this is an old link), especially when quoted by somebody banned from the community.
What I can say about present-day Zig, as VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, is that, to put it in simple terms, we want to take a step away from the usual "get vc money, build a moat" dance that big tech likes to play.
That said, we aren't anti-business and in fact the choice of an MIT license is deliberate to provide the highest degree of freedom to any Zig user, be it individuals or companies.
The problem is that the Zig project just doesn't want anything to do with connectFree and so Andrew took appropriate measures to cut them off.
In light of the consequences of Mozilla depending so much on corporate sponsorships, it almost seems weird to me that we need to clarify why we'd like to walk a different path.
But what a PR opportunity! Here's an outfit selling Zig (because it's good enough already), which won't even hit 1.0 for "two years" \o/
("Two years" is from Andrew on a recent podcast.)
Are there examples in today's market where a business can depend on a new programming language? I'm curious because I'm writing a programming language, and I'd love to turn it into a business.
edit: add "new" to programming language
Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support.
We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of formal role.
Regarding commercializing compilers: our main market is in embedded and as others have pointed out, charging for compilers and support is not uncommon.
One of our big main differences between Zig is that Zen natively supports vtables and traits that we call interfaces[1].
Although our core market is in Japan, we are preparing our English website and hope to have it out soon.
On a more personal note, I am happy that Zig is growing and that they got the foundation together. At the peak before the fork, I was the 5th largest contributor to Zig, so I am very happy to hear when people say that they are enjoying the language.
It's midnight in Japan, but I will try to field questions if any.
[0] https://zen-lang.org/zig/ [1] https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/
https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF...
(for people that can't read japanese: click the "english" link on the top right for a translation)
(edit: fixed link, I pasted another trademark registration by connectfree by mistake)
Probably taken down?
How quickly after posting this did you regret it as a foolish midnight decision?
