
Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language - RabbitmqGuy
https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming-language.html
======
rainfall
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...](https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF75D797BF8A8562102A23936240FF60A15248A6D91AF8F8F1D741CC24A962DD/40/ja)
[2]
[https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A7...](https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2019-153075/A707749AD6C41F384D8CED6C08A74E7898E52A3D0239F66CE1A12E89F0D927DB/40/ja)

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
IANAL, but to your point about the copyright notices: I suspect that the
license may not require you to retain the notices, but that doesn't mean that
you can "take" the copyright. Copyright is associated with authorship and
can't be taken by mere declaration. I could publish a copy of Shakespeare's
works on my website, and I could put "(c) My Name 2020" at the top, but that
would _not_ confer actual copyright ownership of the work on me. It would
simply be an incorrect assertion.

~~~
nanny
You have it backwards. The MIT/Expat _does_ required you to retain a copyright
notice (in the form of a copy of the license, not in the form of file
headers), which Zen does. In addition, creating a derivative work does in fact
give you copyright on the new work. The Shakespeare comparison does not apply
because Shakespeare is not licensed under the MIT/Expat license.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
> MIT/Expat does required you to retain a copyright notice (in the form of a
> copy of the license, not in the form of file headers)

OK, but I was talking about the file headers. :)

> In addition, creating a derivative work does in fact give you copyright on
> the new work

Sure, but the new work is the portions that you've changed, not the portions
that you've copied, right?

"The derivative work cannot be an uncreative variation on the pre-existing
work or it would simply be a copy of the pre-existing work . . . " from here:
[https://bit.ly/3c21Yul](https://bit.ly/3c21Yul)

~~~
nanny
>OK, but I was talking about the file headers. :)

Gotcha, then you are correct. The MIT/Expat only requires: "The above
copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or
substantial portions of the Software". As long as they are in compliance on
that regard then they are in the clear.

>Sure, but the new work is the portions that you've changed, not the portions
that you've copied, right?

No, the new work is the piece of software work as a whole, not the individual
files. "Work" in this context is a legal term that includes all of the source
code and nonliteral elements of the software, aka the Structure, Sequence, and
Organization
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization)

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
R.e. your second statement, I can only presume that you're right, but I'm
confused about how this works with copyright license agreements, or the cases
where projects have had to go and get copyright releases from authors of
individual lines of code to make a license change. If the copyright is on the
entire work, how can a contributor of just one line of code own the copyright?
Anyway. You seem more versed in this than I am, so I bow to your expertise.

~~~
nanny
In that case, there would be multiple authors of a single copyrighted work.
I'm only familiar/knowledgeable with GNU copyright assignment, however, not
copyrights in general. [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-
assign.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html)

------
drcode
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.

~~~
falcolas
That's one of the costs of using the MIT and BSD licenses: anybody can take it
and go private/for-profit with it (without giving back even a "thanks"), and
all the author can do is issue a strongly worded statement about it.

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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
> 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.

~~~
johnnyfaehell
> It's not OK to say: well you didn't make your project GPL, so you don't get
> to complain.

I kind of agree with you and kind of disagree with you. You should be able to
complain all you want. However, if explictly decide to give people certain
rights when you complain about them using those rights it shouldn't hold much
value. Which is what I think was the original point in the sentence you
replied to.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Well if you complain about a "hostile fork" that's just somebody stripping
your branding and releasing a commercial fork, that should fall on deaf ears.
That's in the spirit of MIT, and you've just picked your license poorly.

But what's being alleged here is actual hostility and deception. If it's true,
Zig being MIT licensed in no way removes their "moral high ground" (as GP put
it) to make a post like this.

~~~
falcolas
Here's my point of view - why does Zig even care what Zen is doing? Zen's
shortcomings don't impact the userbase or development of Zig in any real
fashion.

The fact that the Zig foundation wrote this letter condemning the actions of
Zen's founder/employees - especially when they closed the letter with a call
to action to return to Zig - shows that Zen's fork actually matters to them,
that they don't believe it should remain functional.

~~~
darthrupert
I suppose they're doing this as a public service, so that fewer people will
fall for this total scam.

~~~
mStreamTeam
Ironically, its just giving a lot of free advertisement to Zen.

Before this post I never knew Zen existed. Now I know it exists and am
emotionally invested in it. And there's no such thing as bad publicity.

------
nindalf
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.

~~~
pjmlp
There are plenty of commercial compilers available.

Embedded platforms, Apple (100€£$/year), Windows, PGI/CUDA, IBM/xlc,game
consoles,....

~~~
chriseidhof
Apple's Xcode is a free download, the Swift compiler is open source. However,
to become an "official" developer on the Apple platforms and publish apps you
do need a paid developer account.

~~~
pjmlp
Hence commercial.

~~~
fastball
Signing binaries and distributing apps on the MacOS and iOS app store is
commercial.

The compiler isn't commercial, unless you are saying that anything Apple makes
is "commercial" because they are a for-profit business.

------
pfraze
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.

~~~
kristoff_it
I think that's a perfectly good point. The ZSF wants to build momentum and
have the language take off. We also are looking for money in order to pay core
contributors.

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](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](https://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/496423.html)

~~~
pfraze
I've dealt with this kind of thing before, it's unpleasant, and I wish you the
best.

------
raphlinus
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.

~~~
munificent
_> This thing looks very unpleasant, but hopefully it conveys the message that
Zig is potentially valuable._

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.

------
CyberRabbi
This is why you always use GPL

~~~
kodablah
For those that believe in software freedoms as fewer restrictions, you have to
accept that people may take advantage of your fewer restrictions. This is the
cost of giving more (beer) freedom, and you don't have to abandon your
principles because of how it manifests. (this has obvious political analogies
in other restriction-less freedom contexts too)

~~~
CyberRabbi
The existence of this blog post suggests to me that they either don’t believe
in total software freedom or they haven’t yet accepted that people will take
advantage of it.

~~~
kodablah
I read it a bit different, I read it as they're proud of their freedom stance,
and they are just informing users about a hostile fork without even hinting at
reducing their principals henceforth.

~~~
CyberRabbi
Then why do they imply in the blog post that “closed source superficial
rebrandings” should be avoided by potential customers?

~~~
wrsh07
Because zig is free? A marked up superficial re banding is a scam

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

~~~
zimpenfish
I remember the hype about how it was going to kill off Flickr - we set up
graphs of how many photos were being uploaded per day to each service and ...
well.

------
bogwog
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.

------
dpc_pw
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.

~~~
wtetzner
> 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.

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.

------
jhardy54
Relevant:
[https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/3ca4925709ac6369391eb4...](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/3ca4925709ac6369391eb40616de33051e0bb1f1)

~~~
mkeedlinger
Also relevant concerning the "No 5" contributor, Mr. Tate:
[https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1530](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1530)

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.

------
kazinator
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?

------
johnnycerberus
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.

~~~
fomine3
Please don't think this is standard on Japanese OSS scene. Zen's origin and
owning company was not well known until now. Now it is thought as BS also on
Japanese community.

------
zerr
Seems like legit? [https://zen-lang.org/zig/](https://zen-lang.org/zig/)

~~~
simias
I do admit that I find the "anti-business" citations pretty strange from the
context of developing a programing language. I can understand this mindset if
you're doing some work of art and don't want it corrupted by corporate drones,
but for a technical tool I don't really get what could go wrong.

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.

~~~
kristoff_it
There are many ways to create relationships between opensource projects and
corporations. Some are sane, some are not.

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.

~~~
simias
That sounds interesting but I'm not sure I understand what this means in
practice. In particular I don't get this at all:

>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.

I think Mozilla's funding is very unhealthy for Firefox in particular because
it's a web browser and there can be a clear conflict of interest, especially
when a lot of the money effectively comes from advertisers. What I want from a
browser and what Google wants from a browser probably differs significantly. I
want good privacy and control, Google wants me to see ads and build a profile.

But how does that translate to Zig, the programing language? For instance as
far as Rust is concerned I'd argue that _more_ corporate involvement is
actually a good thing, it means that the language is here to stay. I may be
naive but I don't really see the failure mode here. What I want from a
programing language and what Google/Amazon/Netflix/Samsung want from a
programing language probably has a lot of overlap.

~~~
kristoff_it
Yeah I agree, sorry, I didn't make the point super clearly.

For the Zig programming language, it means that the commercial entity that
supports the project is the Zig Software Foundation, a non-profit company.
Being non-profit means that we don't have shareholders nagging the board of
directors for dividends, nor we have a VC company forcing decisions on us to
pursue a hockey stick.

Right now we depend on donations and we are accountable to the community
through the restrictions and duties that 501(c)(3) non-profits have.

If at one point we decide that the donation business model doesn't work out,
we'll think of something else, but at least we'll be free from pressure that
would potentially compromise the quality of the final product (i.e. Zig and
its community).

To VCs and other investors that might be reading: we're not against VC money,
but we're not a tech startup. If you decide to invest in Zig, it's because you
have a strategical interest in having succeed one of the most energy-efficient
programming languages ever created.

We're happy to take donations, exchange logos and be vocal about our
appreciation for your support, but the only terms we're going to accept are: X
money for 0 shares and 0 board seats.

~~~
simias
Okay, that makes sense, thank you for clarifying (and good luck, Zig seems
like an interesting language).

------
networkimprov
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.)

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

~~~
azhenley
connectFree, the company selling Zen, is a Japanese company:
[https://connectfree.co.jp/](https://connectfree.co.jp/)

------
mathgladiator
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

~~~
forgotpwd16
The most popular new programming languages (of the recent decade) are backed
up by major corporations (Kotlin, Swift) or improve something (Elm, Julia) or
both (Rust, TypeScript). So if you design a programming language attempt to
improve something that will make your language stand out.

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

------
spiritplumber
for great justice. take off every zig

------
nromiun
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.

~~~
tandr
Because as @rainfall pointed out [1], the company has tried to trademark Zig,
in essence putting a hand over the whole project?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483162)

~~~
nromiun
Sorry. I was posting after just reading the blog. It didn't say anything about
trademarks.

------
kristopher
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/](https://zen-lang.org/zig/) [1]
[https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/](https://www.zen-
lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/)

~~~
kristoff_it
Can you explain why you're attempting to register a "ZIG" trademark in Japan?

[https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF...](https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/c1800/TR/JP-2020-078615/FF75D797BF8A8562102A23936240FF60A15248A6D91AF8F8F1D741CC24A962DD/40/ja)

(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)

~~~
kristopher
Hi Loris, thanks for the question and congratulations on your new role at the
Zig Software Foundation. We originally planned on supporting Zig in Japan via
support contracts and this is from that preparation. Trademarks have multiple
categories and one such category is for contract work and related materials.
We don't plan to use this trademark to harm Zig.

~~~
dnautics
since you have instead settled on forking as the zen PL, which is your right
to do, would you turn that trademark over to the zig foundation as a show of
good faith?

~~~
kristopher
Our communication with the ZSF seems to be on the rocks. If they can
communicate politely, this could be possible. The ZSF has my email address.

~~~
dnautics
If you feel like ZSF is treating you poorly there is nothing stopping you from
taking the high road and making a show of it.

