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.
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.
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?
I find this hard to believe. There are plenty of companies out there providing some kind of product built on top of another (e.g. a language), without registering the name of said product as a trademark of their own.
To me it sounds more like you didn't get the things you wanted, and instead decided to try and take them by force.
Can you share your justification for non-compete clauses in employment contracts as well as contracts which take ownership of employee work done outside work hours?
What is your statement about the fact that Zen clearly takes code from Zig post fork? Do you not find it - extremely - hypocritical that you are using thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lines of someone elses code for free while also mandating your employees enter draconian contracts? Do you think your actions will ostracize you from more communities, as has already occured with yourself and Zig?
How quickly after posting this did you regret it as a foolish midnight decision?
You were the 5th top contributor, which isn't much considering the actual top contributor (Andrew Kelley) still accounts for 60% of commits, even years after your fork "at 0.3".
Speaking of the fork at v0.3, in your response you forgot to address the claim that Zen has lifted changes almost wholesale made to Zig post-0.3. You'd think if Connectfree was doing all this heavy-lifting (as you seem keen to claim), it would be the other way around, no?
Thank-you for the question. Most of heavy lifting is in the actual compiler itself and in the vtables/trait interface feature. Although the cpp implementation now differs most, we never claimed to be a hard fork of Zig.
Of course, I don't deny that, what I'm asking is about the code that was incorporated into your project from Zig after version 0.3, such as async/await, mentioned in this very post.
I contributed to Zig by not forking it for my own financial gain ;). What features did you work on in Zig that gives you the right to claim work you didn't do and incorporate it into your project?
From your method of half responses I can see immediately why you were banned from the Zig community; I expect the next thing I will hear about Zen is its eventual closure. Also, 89 out of 10k commits makes you a footnote, not a major contributor.
It isn't something new, it is a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown. As seen in "common" use on large websites. And any implementation that passes the current spec tests can also brand itself with CommonMark or "Markdown compatible".
Mr. Atwood, you may be too kind. I see this as a chance to bring Markdown to a larger audience by not only standardizing it, but also renaming it as well.
In this endeavor it would appear that you are giving too much credit to Gruber. It is unfortunate that he was not one to be more gracious in the matter.
Very similar here in Japan (Both Tokyo and Kyoto). The price for a glass of soda usually starts around 500 JPY (about $5 US). 100 JPY on the street in a vending machine and 150 JPY from inside of a train station :)
Reddit has an endpoint where you can download all submissions. (however, due to the API limit of 100 submissions / 2 seconds, it took me about 1.5-2 months to get the 41 million submissions)
Have you looked at number of comments instead of number of submissions? That would seem to be a better estimator of user growth.
Honestly, I don't think that estimating number of submissions is a very good metric for the growth of Reddit (or Hackernews). If you want some proxy for its influence, you care about readership more than anything else. This thread [1] on Reddit (and the references therein) shows that 50% of Reddit activity comes from users that aren't even logged in. So even if you were just able to measure logged in users (which would still be a far greater number than submissions), you would still only estimate half the influence.
That investor was spot on. The best signal you can get from a Japanese business partner is their eagerness to go out for a night on the town :)
In Japanese, "We will consider it" or "kentou shimasu" (検討します) literally means to investigate and attack from its Chinese roots and is a way to signal distance.
If you are in early stage talks and if they are serious you will get a request to sign an NDA or some form of binding contract.
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/ [1] https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/