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Comment by MichaelNolan | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see the issue with using corporate backed languages. Java (the language, the core libraries, and the compiler, etc) are all GPL2. GoLang is BSD licensed, c#/dot net is some mix of MIT and a few others.

So what’s the problem? There doesn’t appear to be any risk here.

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There's some risk. A language and it's tooling can be GPL or BSD-licensed, but if it's corporate-controlled, the following things can happen:

- The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community.

- The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not.

And it definitely will not work on that corp's Official Operating System platform.

> The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community.

>The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not.

These both apply to not-corporate projects as well.

But if it's a non-corporate project, and the lead/owner/BDFL decides to go in an evil (or just stupid) direction, and I fork it, my fork has a better chance of gaining some traction. It's not perfect, but it's somewhat better.

(Or so I suspect - I haven't ever been in that position.)

I would assume this also applies to corporate projects as well.

Perfect example: There are 2 Plex alternatives I know of that sort of fit this mold. One is called Emby that started as open source and turned into a closed source commercial product. The other Jellyfin which is (from what I can tell) an open source fork of Emby from before it went closed. Both seem to have picked up some amount of traction.

Touche.

The languages may not make money for the corporation sponsoring them, but they can be used to implement corporate strategy for competitive advantages and you would never even know. The risk you're taking using a language like this is that the sponsor does something with it that is in their best interest instead of yours without your knowledge.

When I started in software development in the late 90's, avoiding proprietary software was a best practice. SQL - great, open, use freely. TSQL and PL/SQL - avoid because of MS and Oracle.

That was my first thought - Java has been corporate controlled since at least 1999 when I started using it and... so far none of the Bad Things that were predicted have happened to it.

Did you read the article? The author is concerned about spyware.

That just seems like a weak concern though. The code for the java compiler is open source. The code for maven is open source. So how is Nim safer from spyware?

If I’m concerned about spyware, then my language and compiler are low down on my list. My OS, my phone, and my network are far higher on the list.

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