On 6/23/14, 9:06 PM, Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals wrote:
On Jun 23, 2014, at 8:43 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals
<[email protected]> wrote:
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.
The only harm this does is that we need someone else to maintain this
code. It does not retroactively change the license. Once it's in
phobos, and it's boost, there's no reneging on that.
What if converting/relicensing it later to Boost 2.0 or some other
license is in the best interest of D, and due to some technicality we'd
need approval of all copyright holders? I don't know much about
copyright law, but I think we can all agree it's complicated and prone
to all sorts of loopholes. We can trust Walter to act in the best
interest of D now and in the future; the alternative on the table is to
trust instead an open union of persons.
BTW, are we talking all of D or just DMD for requiring copyright
assignment? I thought we were just talking DMD (of course, the XML
thing would have been for Phobos, but I thought that was just an
example).
Everything under our github repo.
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.
In some cases, as Daniel pointed out (great point, BTW), the original
author may not be a github user, but some other code that a github
user ported. I would not use the github contributors list as an
authoritative list.
The "Authors:" tag appears in the ddoc text and can contain any
appropriate credits. Just grep for it. You'll see that all my
contributions appear with my name and link to my website.
Andrei
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