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> It's sort of like asking users to turn a corner of their brain into farmland but then giving the compiler authors the key to the padlock on the fence. Users don't want to give financial control over a part of their own headspace to someone else.

Well put. I think this is why the Google/Oracle court battle was so contentious to a lot of programmers. It wasn't just that people hate Oracle (sure, that too), but also that it was about Oracle trying to claim a monopoly on whatever piece of our brains is dedicated to our knowledge of Java.

Well, to be fair, Google is in a unique position to shape opinions and manufacture outrage over their right to ham-fistedly thumb their nose at Oracle's software licenses. Google has hundreds of patents, and they have some applications for patent which are total nonsense (like the heart hand gesture... seriously). I don't think any party involved has a credible moral objection to intellectual property rights. I think they do have different friends D.C.

While I do have some sympathy for the argument that Google has too much power in the court of public opinion, Oracle was clearly on the wrong side of history here. The damage to the industry from allowing APIs to be copyrighted would have been immense.

>Oracle was clearly on the wrong side of history here.

I agree insofar as that is a euphemism to mean that Oracle is not tightly aligned with the interests of the left. Google is a big donor both in cash and in kind. Oracle is much less so.

> The damage to the industry from allowing APIs to be copyrighted would have been immense.

If I were to copy Google Sheets, offer an online service called "Google Sheets" and the only difference is that I modified a handful of implementation details so the service would run my spyware, and not Google's, then I would lose any copyright claims made by Google, hands down. You could make an identical argument that the web interface is an "API" and copying their code is a necessity of providing equivalent functionality. Google ripped off Sun and got away with it because the US legal process is a farce. Denying the right to copyright ANY code at all would be a morally defensible position, but that's not the ruling.

If you stole the source of Google Spreadsheets and built it into your product, of course you’d win. Oracle did not claim that Google did that.

If you built a spreadsheet app that was compatible with Google Spreadsheets’ formula language, Google (rightfully) wouldn’t have much of a case. In fact, Google pretty much did this by implementing much of Excel’s formula language.

That's a very interesting thought and it seems to answer the question in the title (which the linked article doesn't).

In theory though there are certain business opportunities in this space that haven't been explored yet, it seems.

For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. Personally I would pay for a Swift compiler that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic, or doesn't take tens of minutes to fully build a project that isn't even that big. Similarly I'd pay for a replacement for Xcode that doesn't have bugs in every single feature it implements. As an iOS developer I'm honestly very tired of and fed up with both Swift's slowness and Xcode's bugginess. There has to be some competition here too, already.

In other words, competition is what the PL industry is lacking, I think. But not among the languages themselves as much as among the compilers (and possibly the rest of the tooling and environments).

I don't know how we ended up in a world where there's only one compiler per each newly created language. I'm not sure this is normal or it's the way it should be.

> For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction.

I used to think this, but now I am skeptical, because of zapcc. zapcc was almost exactly this: a faster compiler for C++, first propreitary, now open source because it failed. Still no traction.

> that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic

Or some complex Combine chains just hang forever and not compile at all with no indication what the problem is. Yet they keep adding language features that clearly the compiler can't deal with.

Check out AppCode by JetBrains. It's an Xcode competitor.

> For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction.

This is a viable business model in principle but seems to rarely work in practice.

A big part of the problem is that all languages in wide use already have mature compilers and the language itself is evolving as quickly as its designers able to make it.

This means that anyone entering the third-party compiler business has to not only catch up to the existing mature implementation (and be fully bug-for-bug compatible with it), they have to surpass that and track a quickly moving target. So far, few have been able to pull that off successfully.

Does it though? How valuable is knowledge of Pascal, perl 5, Flex, or even uncool JS frameworks like Angular 1 these days? You're at the whims of the mob and fashion just as much as somebody building on a proprietary tool is at the whims of its vendor.