On Sunday, 29 May 2016 at 03:52:33 UTC, open-source-guy wrote:
Hi,
this is a short ping about one of D's weaknesses - the
restrictive license for the backend. IIRC [1, 2, 3] the status
is that because some parts have been written by Walter while he
was employed by Symantec, it can't get an open-source license.
When I read the backend license [4], I read the following:
The Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user
license,
and may not be redistributed. If you wish to obtain a
redistribution license,
please contact Digital Mars.
This actually means that all the 366 forks on Github would
require approval by Digital Mars.
So luckily neither Symantec nor Digital Mars seem to bother
much about the license, so why can't it be changed in an free &
open source license that allows
free redistribution and modification?
This would also make it possible to distribute dmd
out-of-the-box on the two biggest Linux distributions Debian
and Ubuntu [5, 6].
[1] http://tomash.wrug.eu/blog/2009/03/06/free-the-dmd/
[2]
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
[3]
https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/dispelling-common-d-myths
[4]
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/backendlicense.txt
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines
[6]
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-dfsg
Let's drop DMD and move to LDC (as the new DMD). Again and again
people find bugs in the old backend. I know that it'll be hard
for Bright to throw its little baby in the water but seriously
it's not possible anymore.
Symantec is not interested to left its licence to Bright but they
are probably neither interested to do anything with this bugged
backend. Let's drop it.
If they wanna keep the rights on this ok. Let them their "so
loved but not intersting" backend to them and move to something
else for D default compiler.
