TheTrueLinuxDev

This one is something that were brought up a lot by developers including me who are very weary about corporations profiting off of our work for free and this basically put us off from contributing to open source in general.

We get a bunch of dialogues about this such as:

Developers like me: "Many of us who create are concerned about our work being exploited. The possibility of corporations profiting from our open-source contributions without giving back to the community disincentivizes us from participating in such endeavors."

Open-Source Advocates: "The AGPL exists to mitigate such concerns. It requires derivative works to also be open-source."

Developers like me: "While I appreciate the intention behind AGPL, there is a loophole - a 'condom code' if you will. Even though Linux Kernel prevents such strategies by refusing to merge these changes and that it's difficult for a singular corporation to force an adoption of a forked version of Linux Kernel, a corporation can fork our much smaller project however and introduce such legal bypass to the copyleft restrictions. This bypass can be justified by them under the guise of extending the software's capabilities with a plugin interface or an interprocess communication protocol layer, similar to how PostgreSQL allows User Defined Functions. However, I must caution that I'm not well-versed in the legal intricacies."

When bringing up on non-commercial clause for licensing

Open-Source Advocates: "Disallowing commercial use of your project contradicts the principles of open-source."

Developers like me: "Well, then perhaps we need a new term, something like 'Open Code Project'. We can create projects that encourage collaboration and openness while also restricting commercial exploitation."

So I created this post, because we do need to discuss on a path forward for Open Source in general knowing that corporation can shirk around this restriction and discourage developers like me from participating in open source or open code projects.

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This thread delves into contemplating the concept of "Melosynthos," more aligned towards being a compiler generator rather than strictly a parser generator.

Initially, I was engrossed in a Python Lark fork while concurrently developing an unique shader language, primarily for Vulkan Compute (SPIR-V, to be precise), aiming at Machine Learning (intending to replace the Pytorch framework). Python Lark's parser generator appealed to me due to its simplicity-centric grammar syntax, prompting me to create a fork in C language. This new version was designed to support a top-down LL(k) parser algorithm and generate corresponding AST trees.

Upon successfully getting it to function, it dawned on me how complex and challenging the iterative development of a compiler could be. The task of designing a programming language and writing the compiler implementation, along with the eventual Language Server Protocol, seemed daunting for a single developer.

This realization sparked the question - could we streamline the entire process, right from the parser generator to the compilation output target? This led to the inception of the Meta-AST and subsequently, the Melosynthos project.

The Meta-AST scripting language is essentially conceptualized to interact with the generated raw AST tree, providing traversal and visitor syntax. This enables users to enhance, refine, or rectify the "Raw" AST with more comprehensive data, such as type information or context-free grammar support.

The Melosynthos compiler generator project primarily involves three stages: the standard Backus-Naur Form grammar for generating Lexer/Parser and raw AST, the Meta-AST script interacting with the AST, and the final compilation output reading the AST and printing it out.

Envision a scenario where everything is streamlined from the start, enabling the generation of any dialects or features in the language as a full compiler in the output, accompanied by an LSP server. Despite searching extensively, I couldn't find any existing tools to accomplish this.

Consequently, I began musing about the potential structure and function of Meta-AST, emphasizing its readability and familiarity for compiler designers. It borrows elements from Regex (like "^" for the start of an array and "$" for the end), functional programming for pure function transformation and analysis, and differentiation between "dialects."

Consider the following example of an AST tree represented in JSON:

{
    "rule": {
        "HELLO": { "Content": "Hello", "Line": "1", "Col": "1" },
        "WORLD": { "Content": "World", "Line": "1", "Col": "6" },
        "SET_OF_EXCLAIMATION_MARK": [
            { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "12"} },
            { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "13"} },
            { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "14"} }
        ]
    }
}

For a basic analysis of this AST tree, we could attribute the AST with the following script:

local myAST = .; // You are making a copy of the current AST
myAST.rule.SET_OF_EXCLAIMATION_MARK.summarize(
    MarkCount = this.Count,
    StartColumn = this[^].Col,
    EndColumn = this[$].Col,
    StartLine = this[^].Line,
    EndLine = this[$].Line
);

This would add counts for exclamation marks, start and end columns for this particular rule in the grammar, and the start and end lines for diagnostic purposes.

I share this here to muse over the concept and encourage some discussions surrounding it. I hope it sparks some interests in this topic.