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Comment by slowhadoken | Hacker News Reader

Is it a good idea to embed a proprietary language into a open source os?

The C language requires paying a 216 CHF by anyone that actually wants to understand how the language works, and not how their compiler deals with the source.

Plenty of times they aren't the same.

https://www.iso.org/standard/74528.html

That's not really fair, the working drafts are freely available and (if you take the latest one before official standardization) are the same as the official releases. https://port70.net/~nsz/c/c23/n3220.pdf

To be honest, I've never met a single professional who actually bought any IEEE or ISO standard.

They are drafts for a reason.

Plus who seats at WG14 table?

Big corporations selling compilers and OSes.

Hi. I've paid for access to ISO standards for PDF related work.

But are you professional in their eyes? :’D

> The C language requires paying a 216 CHF by anyone that actually wants to understand how the language works, and not how their compiler deals with the source.

The binary you are actually executing is made with your compiler, not with the standard; which is just a static human readable document after all.

Though I'm not sure what your point is.

How did that compiler sprung into existence, magic digital pixie dust?

No, somebody wrote it.

Yes, indeed.

What a strange question..

You know that especially for C, compilers predate the language spec?

Ever heard of a book called K&R C, and another book called The Annotated Reference of UNIX, aka Lion's Book?

Also lots of AT&T and Bell Labs money poured into employees salaries.

What about that book? K&R C is more of an introduction and perhaps a manual. It ain't a spec.

And that book was very much written to describe existing implementation(s) of C.

Proprietary? Go is under the BSD license.

Yes. The Go implementation from Google is under the BSD licence.

There's also the GNU implementation in GCC that's under the GNU GPL 3 licence. Moreover, the specification itself doesn't seem to have any licencing requirements at all.

So you're absolutely right: Go is the very opposite of proprietary.

In the same way .NET is proprietary under MIT license.

Welcome to the club :)

Golang is trademarked by Google. It’s a corporate faux open source project. FAANG is co-opting free labor. Even open source platforms like GitHub are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. What Microsoft or Google can’t defeat they acquire.

FOSSmarks (hosted by FSF, and writers include people affiliated with FSF)[0]:

>Trademarks and FOSS are not incompatible; instead, trademarks are legal tools strongly aligned with FOSS principles. A trademark is an assurance that the recipient of the goods or services is receiving a product of known source and qualities. Controlling how a FOSS project trademark is used protects the community and its software, by preventing use of the trademark in ways that are harmful to the reputation of the community or the software.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds[1]. GNU is a registered trademark of the FSF[2]. Your definition of "proprietary" isn't shared by virtually anyone, and would make virtually everything "faux open source", including the "open source os" project you originally worried about Go being integrated into.

[0] https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/FOSSmarksv2.pdf

[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74560867&caseSearchType=U...

[2] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85380218&caseSearchType=U...

Meredith Whittaker and Elon Musk share similar opinions as me on the subject. I assume you’re a captain of industry?

How is Go proprietary?

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