I think this is a fairly misguided rant, and ignores the real priorities (and risks) that I have as a developer - both personally and professionally.
I'm happy to use languages funded by corporations - the incentives for them are clear, they fund development and work on the tooling and spec for their own use-case - they garner additional support, momentum, and goodwill by releasing the language under an open definition (and sometimes also release an open version of the tooling around the language).
I don't really know what the author wants from a package management tool. At least personally - I fully expect it to communicate with the package host provider, and for them to track information about what I'm downloading... It's a network based tool that fetches remote resources someone else is hosting (usually for free).
Decent package managers will also support self-hosted repositories, and allow configuration for 3rd party repositories.
I also don't find this sort of tracking particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are.
Further - GCC is absolutely and example of a corporate provided language being adopted and tooling developed outside that corporation's control. Not sure what the author is smoking... but C was developed under corporate control at Bell labs of AT&T. Further - there's still a wild amount of closed source tooling around C that comes out of Microsoft, and is absolutely high quality (and not cheap).
Mono is an example of this for C# - Corporate language, open implementation. Javascript was developed by Netscape (another corporation) and now has dozens of different runtimes. Some open, some less open.
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Basically - What the fuck is the author talking about?
"Admittedly C also came from a corporation but it came free with every unix install and soon after I started using it, Richard Stallman et al. gave us GCC, a free C compiler."
But at the time AT&T couldn't spy on its CC users though so the risk was lower I guess.
> But at the time AT&T couldn't spy on its CC users though so the risk was lower I guess.
Sure they could... What do you think there were doing when they were selling System III & System V?
They compiled customer lists, and sales contacts, contract agreements and everything else you'd expect from an org selling commercial software. Was it "automated" in the same way that tracking use from a package manager is? No. Was it tracking? Fuck yes.
Unix wasn't free until the FSF began the GNU project...
Hell, even the BSD variants of unix were sold - they weren't free software. Are there free implementations that exist today? Yes. They exist because the item being sold and maintained by the corporation is NOT the spec for the language/os (the recipe) it's their implementation of it.
UNIX was "free" though, because it was available in source tapes, which none of the competition was, and due to the restrictions on AT&T research use, they were only allowed to charge for a symbolic price of tape replication and sending costs.
The lawsuit and request to take the Lion's commentary out of print came after AT&T got allowed again to take profit from their research.
> particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are.
This is substantially less than what code running on your machine can do, which is basically unlimited its spying capabilities. Yes, this is a problem in itself that needs to be fixed.
Otherwise you appear to willfully misunderstand. These may not be your priorities, but taking offense and framing them as "crazy" does a disservice.
Because it turns out if this really is your priority - there are active ways to handle it because, despite being corporate sponsored, the language definition is still open...
> Otherwise you appear to willfully misunderstand. These may not be your priorities, but taking offense and framing them as "crazy" does a disservice.
Show me any non-corporate sponsored language that is not a toy, and is seeing serious traction. (hint - I enjoy Nim, but it's not a valid answer).
Unlike the original post implies - most of the languages in his list are corporate sponsored...
D was created at Digital Mars
Open Pascal is... an open implementation of pascal, which was created by IFIP, but most variants are dead and Borland poured a fuck load of money into turbo pascal. So both gov + corporate sponsors
Nim... is arguably not corporate sponsored, but it comes right out of open Pascal (which was) and it has trivial use at large (I still enjoy the language - I'm not about to suggest we use it at work).
Same as Zig - which is probably the closest to being a true open project in the list (IMO) but which still builds heavily on c++ tooling. (Honestly - I'm most excited about Zig, it's nice and is very close to self-hosting)
Steel bank comes right out of Carnegie Mellon (and if you don't think colleges are corporations... boy I've got news for you)
Vale... well I actually don't really know anything about this. Honestly one of the first time's I've seen it referenced at all, I'll have to look it up some time.
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So again - WTF is the author talking about?
If he just wants a free compiler (Free as in free, not as in beer) they exist for basically any large language out there.
If he wants to control language direction and goals... well - he's welcome to write his own language but otherwise I find no compelling difference between a guiding committee/creators on what he considers a "good" language, and the company making decisions for "corporate controlled" languages. If anything - at least I can usually predict what the corporate controlled languages will do, even if it's not always what I'd like...
Just to turn your own example against you for a moment: Mono is dead. If you were using it for your cross-platform WinForms desktop app, as my team was, you're now stuck with no updates and no migration path to MS' new offering, MAUI (though it still doesn't run on Linux, and nor did the several UI frameworks in between). At least Mono is still getting patches. They even recently did a stable build after a long hiatus.
I believe the cause of Mono's death was a combination of MS buying out the company where many Mono devs worked (Xamarin), and the huge rearchitecting MS did for .NET Core. The latter being something that on paper sounds great for openness and cross-platform support—but in practice, it hasn't turned out that way. The .NET team is mostly MS and they still play favourites with Windows (and increasingly Android, which is fair) and Visual Studio.
Eh - I don't really know that dead is the right term, and I think it mostly served it's purpose (It's actually still getting fairly regular commits, but I agree that it's no longer keeping pace with dot net core)
I would also draw a pretty clear distinction between C# the language, and something like WinForms.
And that's really the whole point - implementations differ in functionality exposed and features worked on (hell - just the compatibility issues and differences between clang/GCC/MSVC is a great example). The corporate implementation is usually the most feature full because it has the most resources poured into it.
That's not a problem. That's the community being able to take advantage of those resources. If/when the company stops being a useful partner, they're free to ditch them and fork (and this is historically how things like Linux/OpenBSD/Gnu tooling exist...)
So again - if you have a real problem with using the corporate release, use the open versions. Contribute to them.
But I don't find it a compelling argument to say that just because a language is sponsored by a company we should avoid it. Doubly so if the corporate version is licensed well.
I'm happy to use languages funded by corporations - the incentives for them are clear, they fund development and work on the tooling and spec for their own use-case - they garner additional support, momentum, and goodwill by releasing the language under an open definition (and sometimes also release an open version of the tooling around the language).
I don't really know what the author wants from a package management tool. At least personally - I fully expect it to communicate with the package host provider, and for them to track information about what I'm downloading... It's a network based tool that fetches remote resources someone else is hosting (usually for free).
Decent package managers will also support self-hosted repositories, and allow configuration for 3rd party repositories.
I also don't find this sort of tracking particularly malicious... not any more than I would find it both reasonable and sane for a store to be tracking how many customers they get a day, and to pay attention to what their hot-selling items are.
Further - GCC is absolutely and example of a corporate provided language being adopted and tooling developed outside that corporation's control. Not sure what the author is smoking... but C was developed under corporate control at Bell labs of AT&T. Further - there's still a wild amount of closed source tooling around C that comes out of Microsoft, and is absolutely high quality (and not cheap).
Mono is an example of this for C# - Corporate language, open implementation. Javascript was developed by Netscape (another corporation) and now has dozens of different runtimes. Some open, some less open.
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Basically - What the fuck is the author talking about?