from Hacker News

Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language

by RabbitmqGuy on 9/15/20, 1:48 PM with 286 comments

  • by rainfall on 9/15/20, 4:28 PM

    As a Japanese-speaking software engineer, I found that the company, connectFree, did too many suspicious acts as below:

    - 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...

  • by drcode on 9/15/20, 2:38 PM

    As somebody that just got into Zig and loves the language, it makes me super sad that the developers on this project have to spend their valuable time stressing about BS like this.

    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.

  • by nindalf on 9/15/20, 2:28 PM

    Probably the strangest part of this is a person trying to sell a paid version of a compiler. Did that person miss the boat by 30 years? All mainstream programming languages today are free and open source. Programming languages are platforms that thrive only when they're widely adopted. The community that adopts it builds the libraries and ecosystem necessary for it to be viable. You can't possibly build a new platform with a high barrier to entry if you're competing with established platforms where the barrier to entry is next to nothing.

  • by pfraze on 9/15/20, 3:28 PM

    Something which people don't always recognize about open source is how "value-capture" works for creators. FOSS eschews direct monetization (selling licenses to the core product) based on an ethical premise (it's unfairly limiting to end-users) and/or a business premise (the ecosystem is a key to the value prop and licenses would slow down the ecosystem growth).

    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.

  • by raphlinus on 9/15/20, 4:22 PM

    I just want to say that I really admire and support what Zig is trying to do here. It takes guts to try to launch an ecosystem from a fun hobby to something that can be used in production and hopefully sustain its contributors. They're not there yet, but it looks like they may well be on that journey.

    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.

  • by CyberRabbi on 9/15/20, 2:22 PM

    This is why you always use GPL

  • by tibbydudeza on 9/15/20, 3:05 PM

    Kristopher Tate - he wrote a photo hosting competitor to Flickr way back during the Techcrunch heydays called ZOOOOMMER.

  • by bogwog on 9/15/20, 5:19 PM

    I wonder why they decided to go with the MIT license rather than GPL or something similar. Choosing GPL would protect the project from situations like this, attract more contributors, and have no impact on commercial usage of the language itself.

  • by dpc_pw on 9/15/20, 4:39 PM

    MIT license allows it, so where's the problem. It's like people who support freedom of speech, and then cry anytime someone used it to say something they don't like.

    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.

  • by jhardy54 on 9/15/20, 4:32 PM

  • by kazinator on 9/15/20, 5:14 PM

    Massive Streisand effect here. The Zig project should just completely ignore this. There is no way this Zen thing is going to go anywhere. Nobody in their right mind would pay for anything of the sort in the year 2020.

    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?

  • by johnnycerberus on 9/15/20, 3:00 PM

    All this drama reminds me of the business culture of Japan, building walls around their gardens, growing stuff with seeds from public parks while having unethical work policies for gardeners.

    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.

  • by zerr on 9/15/20, 2:41 PM

    Seems like legit? https://zen-lang.org/zig/

  • by networkimprov on 9/15/20, 5:35 PM

    I'm sad to hear that the Zig community is burdened by this. I've filed a couple proposals there, and hope to use it post 1.0.

    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.)

  • by JamesCoyne on 9/15/20, 2:52 PM

    Can someone please explain why Zen/Zip is focused on Japan? I feel I might be missing some context.

  • by mathgladiator on 9/15/20, 5:07 PM

    This looks like a complete mess.

    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

  • by person_of_color on 9/15/20, 4:01 PM

    Qn. Why do you think providing a compiler/support for a totally unproven language (for embedded) is a good business model?!

  • by spiritplumber on 9/15/20, 5:30 PM

    for great justice. take off every zig

  • by nromiun on 9/15/20, 5:53 PM

    I don't understand why the Zig developers are getting so stressed over this. So a company forked your open source project. If you are worried about closed source forks use GPL. If you are worried that people will confuse Zig with Zen just post a warning. Honestly, I don't understand why they are comparing source code and dragging three people into it.

  • by kristopher on 9/15/20, 3:06 PM

    Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama!

    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/