On 6/23/14, 5:25 PM, Walter Bright via dmd-internals wrote:
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 concur. If the contributor holding the copyright disappears, we can't
change the license anymore. If the contributor holding the copyright has
a falling with D, they can do harm by suddenly changing license for
their part of Phobos. I don't see any good for anyone out of this - only
the right to damage D in the future if they so want.
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.
Don't forget the "Authors:" tag. In a few cases we've erred on the side
of more credit, e.g. list as authors people who contributed only a small
fraction of a module.
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?
There was the same problem with Tango dates and times. We couldn't even
look at the respective Tango code - and how many ways can one really
implement the classic dates and times algorithms? - because of
exhausting scrutiny from people who were apparently looking to pick a fight.
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.
And that's where the potential harm lies if we federalize copyright in
Phobos.
Andrei
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