On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 17:32:25 UTC, Eugene Wissner wrote:
On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 17:04:25 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
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.
I still would prefer if this "something else" would GDC .
When I look at how many messages there are on the GDC news group
compared to LDC's one it's clear that GDC must has been more
popular at a time. But this time is done.
