Comment by mjr00
2 days ago
> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.
It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.
Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.
It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.
For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.
I think the blog post was cringe, but the part with relieving a burden stuck with me. I don't think its acceptable to have trillion dollar companies or companies at all sit on your neck using your project in a way you don't like and subtly influencing its trajectory just because they want to make money. License back and forth, but it doesn't feel right to me personally. Its like the guy who wrote the stuff that is used for the intrusive Intel IME. Now pair that with the tasteless LLM and AI narratives and you got yourself into a big dilemma.
Let's say you make a language and try stuff out but its used by facebook and suddenly you find yourself in calls solving problems for them but you never really wanted to end up in this situation or work with people from such in environment. Meanwhile the compensation/donation does not match the value they are extracting from your work. Hard to say, I'm very mixed on this.
If he's so relieved that Bun/Anthropic are off Zig, then why trash Jarred? He should say thank you and move on.
What this looks like to me is Jarred sinned by selling to Anthropic (as opposed to setting up a 501c3 or whatever Andrew deems righteous) and now must be discredited.
At the end of the day our personal feelings matter very little unless we happen to be the authoritarian dictator or we are the type of personality that gets other people to follow our cause.
In a more just society we setup the rule of law so when you pick a license you have the ability to enforce it without being completely destroyed by a larger entity. When you set your license to 'do whatever you want' then this is causality. You cannot interact with the world and expect it not to affect you, both positive or negative.
What does this mean for the future of the open source world? Not really sure there is a lot up in the air right now. Maybe more 'fuck you' licenses that scare corporations from using your software in the first place. Who knows.