On 6/23/2014 10:59 AM, Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals wrote:
I think the issue is that some future developers will not contribute. Some
people just don't want to give up all rights to their work.
What practical right does one retain when it is licensed under Boost?
Ya know, I don't want to retain rights to D. I originally tried to make it
public domain, until several people informed me that PD was not a legal concept
in many countries. Boost was the next best thing. I want to continue to make D
as available as possible, and that means the license may need to be adjusted in
the future. If contributors do not share those goals, then yes, they should
reconsider contributing to D.
I do understand the issue of retaining credit for one's work. But I believe that
the github commit history amply supports that goal, and is one of the reasons I
am very much in favor of using github for D.
I don't know that I care about copyright assignment for DMD either way. Boost is
certainly a very permissive license, > and I don't see us moving to an incompatible
one in the future. On the other hand, you don't know what will happen in > the
future. Someone future court challenge can make our version of boost unusable for some
entire bloc of users, and > then we would be stuck. The likelihood of this latter
case is astronomically low I think.
As an aside, the tango XML library is not something that we could "just
incorporate", so I don't think that's a fair > example. It requires tango's entire
stream system.
I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect the stream system dependency would
be easily converted to ranges.
And in general, the author of that module had proven not to be amenable to
having any of his code in phobos.
There were multiple authors of Tango XML, and one did not want to change the
license. So all the other contributors had their code thrown under the bus as
well. Note that many bits of Tango did wind up in Phobos, because all the
contributors of those bits did agree. That's the big problem - one person can
hold the whole thing hostage, intentionally or simply by being unavailable. Do
we really want that for dmd?
I think the copyright assignment issue there is moot. Also, note that the
requirement on the wiki is for DMD only. It does not specify phobos/druntime
contributions have the requirement, and as far as I know, we do not have that
authorization from all phobos/druntime contributors.
Is there some compromise we can attain that allows updating the license to some
future version of Boost without assigning full copyright to Digital Mars?
The entity that can change the license is the copyright holder.
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