Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals, el 23 de June a las 23:17 me escribiste: > 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.
Yeah, that's the real way to go if the goal is to protect D's interests. Walter could go bananas too, or die. I know at this point this option might be unrealistic and the most practical solution is to keep giving the rights to Walter/DigitalMars, but I can definitely understand people being concerned about giving up their rights to a private company that has no legal obligation to do what's best for D instead of its own interests. Then, there are a bunch of very serious projects that have settled with a license and don't require copyright assignment, like LLVM (which I think have a similar position to D in terms of being freely available for any use). The FSF asks for copyright assignment not to be able to change the license in the future (for that reason they say in the license that you can use any newer GPL version, at your choice), but for litigation reasons, to be able to enforce the license, which I guess is not a concern for D if you basically want to have it effectively as Public Domain. http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#copyright https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html -- Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca) http://llucax.com.ar/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- In 1995 a Japanese trawler sank, because a Russian cargo plane dropped a living cow from 30,000 feet _______________________________________________ dmd-internals mailing list [email protected] http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
