On 6/22/2014 2:15 PM, David Nadlinger via dmd-internals wrote:
On 22 Jun 2014, at 20:38, Walter Bright via dmd-internals wrote:
It's still a good idea, as I'm not sure what issues may come up about it in
the future. We've had contributors disappear before, questions come up, and
we were forced to abandon their contributions as a result.
Putting aside all the other reasons why I think requiring copyright assignment
now is a really bad idea:
1. What instance of troubles are you referring to, specifically?
Jascha Wetzel wrote a Windows debugger in D, for example. His license was
incompatible, he disappeared, his project was abandoned as a result. Then
there's the case of the Tango code, such as the excellent XML parser - can't be
incorporated into dmd because of the license. All that value got abandoned;
nobody benefited from it. What a waste.
2. How would a dubious copyright assignment give you any more security than
licensing a contribution under Boost?
If issues come up that only the copyright holder can resolve, we will be
completely unable to resolve them. For example, I needed assignments in order to
change the license to Boost. If one major contributor had refused, then where
would we be?
Also note that systematically requiring copyright assignment before merging a
change on GitHub is not something we are currently doing. I was just not sure
whether it is something you want to start doing.
I don't think it's critical for smallish contributions, as they can be worked
around if necessary. For larger ones, yes.
You say you're worried about something with this - can you explain? What's
"really bad" about it?
_______________________________________________
dmd-internals mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
