I want to first qualify that I represent only myself, nobody from
Phobos, nobody from Tango, not Walter nor Andrei nor Kris nor Lars nor
SHOO nor anyone but me.
Please see this message:
http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-June/000783.html
Quoted here completely for convenience:
Walter Bright wrote:
"Although I do not believe that SHOO's work on the date/time is legally
infringing on Tango's time code, I feel there's been enough bad feeling
about this and that we should not include Tango's time api design in
Phobos.
I apologize to SHOO for this. I know this is unfair to him.
Andrei has given a start to std.gregorian, perhaps SHOO's implementation
work can be transferred to this to help complete it?"
------
So I want to re-stress some points I have made in the past, and respond
to some statements that have been made by others.
First, let's recap what happened. According to SHOO, he was a user of
Tango's time library, and used the online documentation of Tango, and
the existing implementation of Phobos to write a new Phobos-ified time
library that was similar to Tango's api. Having been one of the main
authors of Tango's time package, I examined SHOO's implementation
side-by-side with Tango's, I can say that I believe him. IMO, it's not
the same code or even derived, it just has a similar feel.
Someone from Tango was alerted to this, and considered it to be
infringing to the point where he/she called Walter and told him so.
Walter, as someone who wants nothing to do with controversy and possible
legal issues, refused to accept the code based on this accusation. Note:
I was not a part of this call, so I do not know what was said exactly in
it, these are my interpretations of the posts on the newsgroup.
Lars of Tango wrote a message to the Phobos mailing list indicating that
in his opinion, "claiming a clean room implementation of an API in D is
difficult, if for no other reason that it is (due to imperfect doc
generation etc) somewhat difficult to properly study a D API without at
the same time reading the source (or glimpsing at it). Even if you have
good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important to know this,
there may be less forgiving actors out there." You can read the entire
message here:
http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/phobos/2010-April/000370.html
Coupled with the phone call asking Walter to block the code, at this
point, we could just say that Tango was being careful. But under the
circumstances, it appears to me that Tango is under the impression that
simply admitting one has used Tango, combined with having made a library
inspired by Tango's API, is enough to warrant an accusation of
infringement. I don't even know if anyone from Tango examined the code
or not.
Thus ensued a large discussion (to phrase it politely) in which several
good ideas for resolving the problem came to light. Some of them focused
on getting a boost license for Tango's time code. It was revealed that
one of the authors, John Chapman, was not reachable by the Tango team,
and so it would take some time to get John's permission. After a few
days, I took it upon myself to seek out John and get his input. He
responded to me positively, and indicated he would alert the Tango team.
If we count the four authors listed in the Tango code (I'm somewhat
convinced that a 5th author does not exist), that meant that both John
and I had agreed to license the time code under the boost license for
Phobos. This left two authors.
Out of respect for Tango's ownership of the situation, I let it sit for
over a week, expecting at any time that someone from Tango would contact
Walter with good news. Having heard nothing, I decided to push the
matter a little further and post to the newsgroup my success with John.
An indication from Moritz Warning, a Tango user, was that he had spoken
with the remaining two authors: "I have asked Kris Bell and Matti
Niemenmaa. No Problem at all."
This left the infamous 2nd gunma... I mean 5th author. After requests
for who this person was on the newsgroup, I got nothing.
Almost two weeks later, I decided to give up temporarily on the 5th
author, if the other two were OK with it, I could get more leverage to
finding out who that 5th person was. I just wanted to make sure I had a
direct statement from both those authors, as hearsay isn't very good
evidence. After posing the question to Moritz, Matti Niemenmaa posted
his approval of the license change on the newsgroup. (A sincere thank
you for that!)
Which leads us to Kris. Apparently, Kris has no comment. Having no
comment in this issue is equivalent to saying no without sounding like
you are saying no. Because a unanimous 'yes' vote is required to change
things, abstaining means things will stay the way they are. That's an
interesting way to go...
So to answer some questions/comments stated a few months ago:
have you thought about just asking the authors of the Tango code
inquestion?
No, I hadn't, but I did. Kris says no (comment).
I would imagine they would say that they only see a minor resemblance
inthe api and asking wouldn't even be necessary from their point of view.
I guess your imagination was incorrect. I don't know why, but Kris does
not want a non-infringing reimplementation of Tango's time code in Phobos.
But since W/Phobos is very copyright sensitive, I'm sure they will
givethe permission.
Nope.
"Even if you have good intentions, as I'm sure Shoo had, it is important
to know this, there may be less forgiving actors out there."
I guess I found one.
------
Draw the conclusions you want. I'll say that Tango developers have every
right to defend their intellectual property, and every right to insist
on their license being unchanged. Walter has every right to decide what
code gets included in Phobos and under what license. I have no say in
any of these matters, I can only observe and provide suggestions/analysis.
To reiterate what someone else said, to me Tango is poison. It appears
to me from SHOO's story that just *using* Tango is poison. I feel like
all the contributions I have made (and the other two authors have made)
are being held hostage for no good reason (I still don't know why). I
stand by my decision to leave that project, and I hope this story has at
least given you an idea of why.
I also extend Tango an invitation to use any of my code from Phobos,
druntime, or dcollections and relicense it under their license. I have
no problem with people using my code, as long as I can also use it as I
see fit.
-Steve
P.S., I will not respond to this thread except to make any
clarifications/corrections. I've said my share.
