Ask HN: Which programming languages do not have corporate branding?

1 points by __strisk 8 years ago | 6 comments

I am interested in getting a list of languages that do not belong to a major corp, like Google Dart and Mozilla's Rust.

C originated from Bell Labs, Javascript originated from Netscape, both are now free in a sense.

Python belongs to the Python Software Foundation. Dlang belongs to the Dlang foundation.

Kotlin belongs to Jetbrains. Hacklang to Facebook, Go to Google.

So, today, which programming languages can you use and not be affiliated with the Big 4 (FB, GOOG, APPL, MSOFT) or other smaller companies?

*edit: Rust apparently has minimal or small affiliation with Mozilla. my mistake.

steveklabnik 8 years ago |

Mozilla employee paid to work on Rust here. We (that is, Mozilla employees who work on Rust) tend to think of Rust as an open source project we contribute to heavily, rather than a Mozilla project that's open source. This has a number of implications.

Mozilla holds a trademark on the name and logo, and pays some salaries. They also pay for the CI bill. Copyright is held by the individual contributors, not Mozilla.

Governance of Rust itself is comprised of many small teams. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html Last time I checked, there's roughly 60 people on those teams, and 15 of them are employed by Mozilla. The "core team" is 6 Mozilla employees out of 9 people.

We have had almost 2100 contributors in an all-time sense, for each six-week release period, we have about 120 people on average. So the vast majority of work is done by non-Mozilla people.

Take from this what you will :)

dom96 8 years ago | |

> So the vast majority of work is done by non-Mozilla people.

I'm curious how many of those people are working on behalf of another company though :)

steveklabnik 8 years ago | | |

Not very many!

mtmail 8 years ago |

Actually I'm glad there are (non profit) Python/Perl/Ruby etc foundations. I don't see that as corporate branding, but <language name> branding, e.g. owner of the trademark, receiving donations, running conferences.

Lua is independent http://www.lua.org/authors.html

__strisk 8 years ago | |

Correct, I don't count a software foundation as a corporate branding. I see it as a positive.

squiguy7 8 years ago |

Nim https://nim-lang.org/ seems to be an independent language that is getting some traction lately. I haven't used it myself but am impressed with how well the project is doing.