On 10/05/12 01:14, H. S. Teoh wrote:
There are both. Some proprietary developers avoid GPL like the plague due to the whole "you must publish all your precious source code if you distribute the binary" issue. Some other developers, admittedly in the minority compared to the first group, refuse to have anything to do with non-GPL'd code (or at least, have an OSS-compliant license) because of idealogical concerns. (For example, you will not be able to convince an FSF developer to adopt dmd.)
Well, "OSS-compliant licence" covers a LOT of options, not all of them GPL-compatible, not all of them copyleft. I can't see there being a huge problem if DMD were distributed under a permissive license such as Apache, BSD/MIT or Boost. Yes, there might be some hardcore people who would like a strong copyleft approach, but that's a much smaller number of people than the numbers who care about it being a licence that meets the FSF criteria for a free licence.
As for the "avoid GPL" folks, you may already be buggered there. :-) Or you could multi-license so that everyone's happy. (MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licence?)
So are you proposing that we rewrite the dmd backend with fresh code that's not encumbered by the current license?
I think there are a number of possible solutions, including not just a rewrite but also just blessing either GDC or LDC as the reference implementation once their D2 support has reached maturity/parallel with DMD. I'd favour LDC, to avoid the negative associations some people have with the GNU project.
