On 6/24/2014 6:06 AM, Leandro Lucarella via dmd-internals wrote:
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.
I've been doing this for 14 years now. If I was acting in bad faith on this, I suppose it would have been obvious by now. 14 years is quite the "long con" :-)
Not only that, switching DMD from GPL to Boost seems to be going in the wrong direction if I had bad intentions, as that definitely involves me giving up as much legal right to the code as possible. Nobody was pressuring me to do this (which a bit surprised me), I did it because it is the right thing for the D community.
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.
Litigation works the other way, too. Someone could sue Digital Mars over the code. _______________________________________________ dmd-internals mailing list [email protected] http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
