On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 08:30:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/12/2013 11:48 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2013-08-13 02:42, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Is is possible from a licensing standpoint to just distribute
a copy of
gmake built by gnuwin?
I don't see why we couldn't do that. It's a completely
separate tool and
shouldn't "infect" anything else. We might need to accompany
it with a license
file and a link to the source code to be on the safe side.
Again, read my reply to Brad in this thread.
Presumably you are referring to this quote, which does not show
up as a reply?
"Oh, I forgot to mention, licensing.
We want Phobos to be free of any restrictive licensing. GPL is
restrictive, and
so is LGPL.
We very deliberately picked Boost. Having Phobos be a mix of GPL
and Boost would
utterly defeat picking Boost."
If you're only talking about distributing a GPL-licensed gmake
binary with dmd/phobos, I don't think it has any impact on Phobos
licensing, ie the GPL would only apply to the gmake binary. The
GPL is a very badly written license, but I think it has been
generally established that you can distribute tools like gmake or
g++ with your own code and that doesn't make your own code have
to be GPL, as long as gmake/g++ are only used to process/compile
your code and your own code doesn't integrate the source for
gmake/g++, ie gdc, which is almost never the case.
Personally, I like the D-based build system idea. Distribute
dmd/phobos with a D-based build tool like dub, which has been
compiled ahead of time for each supported platform and will
compile D for you, if you want. Of course, this means that
you'll still need to maintain makefiles on the D build machines
that will build dub for the D maintainers to distribute, but it
isolates all the complexity of makefiles from end users, so they
don't have to touch any of that stuff. Whether that ease of use
is worth the extra effort, I don't know.
