On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 12:11 PM Sam Whited <s...@samwhited.com> wrote: > > On Thu, May 23, 2019, at 17:59, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > But (and here you'll just have to trust me) those executives, and > > upper management in general, have never made any attempt to affect how > > the Go language and tools and standard library are developed. Of > > course, there's no reason for them to. Go is doing fine, so why > > should they interfere? And what could they gain if they did > > interfere? So they leave us alone. > > I wanted to further comment on this particular point, since I keep > seeing it brought up and have had it mentioned to me several times OOB > in the context of "why would you care if the Go team can push through > proposals and immediately merge implementations with limited community > input or without the opportunity for alternatives,?Google execs aren't > making these decisions, the Go team is!" > > I believe you when you say that upper management has never interfered > with the direction of Go, but the point is that they could in the > future. Not having a community check on the Go core team means there is > no community check on the future Go core team, or higher up execs that > decide they want a finger in the pie. We don't know who will be in > charge of the Go team in 10 or 20 years, and they may be less principled > than the current team. We also don't know how Google will have changed, > or what kinds of pressures might be put on the Go team from a future over- > zealous Google executive who wants a hand in the proposal process pie.
The ultimate community check is to power to fork the project. I've personally been involved in a successful fork of a significant free software project (search for EGCS in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection) so I know that it is possible. Of course that's not necessarily helpful in practice. I actually agree with earlier comments by Matt Farina that Go is currently open source but not open governance. What I'm not sure about is how much it matters. Also, the open source release of Go was (slightly) less than 10 years ago. Languages like C and C++ did not have any sort of governance model at this stage of their development. I don't know what the Go ecosystem will look like in 10 years, but I know it will be different than it is today. Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAOyqgcUofZ2_WLaR6T8XhD3pAzyqcou6CQvs-aswVda5XtHqHQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
