On 6/24/2014 5:19 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
C.6) You wrote earlier that "the credit has a lot of value to one's professional career", and I couldn't agree more. Yet at the same time, you are asking people for the permission to take it away from them. Regardless of whether you actually intend to do that or not, the simple possibility makes this a rude thing to do without a good reason.
I find this discussion rather exhausting. But I want to respond strongly to this point. The CA simply does not take credit away from a contributor. Copyright status has nothing to do with who did the work. For example, a book author assigns copyright to the publisher, but nobody imagines that the publisher wrote the book.
Most companies do attempt to hide from the outside world who did what. But this project is not like that. We use github, and GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE is one of the primary motivators for that. In fact, the source code to DMD does not break out who did what lines of code and is entitled to credit, so even with no CA, you'd STILL have to examine github to see what's what.
I'm proud that we're using github which enables ALL contributors to get public credit for their work, automatically. Copyright status neither adds nor subtracts from that.
I'm not asking for CA for phobos, because I think that any issues can be worked around, i.e. the modules are replaceable. This is not so true of DMDFE. Trying to unwind a major contributor's work is a completely daunting task. I don't want to ever be faced with such a disaster. I don't have a well-financed phalanx of lawyers to bulldoze past such problems. And would the OTHER contributors to DMD care to have their good work made useless because one other contributor is no longer willing or available to give their consent to a change? The worst thing that could happen to DMD contributors is to have their work abandoned. Me, I don't want to expend my life doing things that would be abandoned, and I expect other open source contributors to feel the same way.
As I recall, there were 5 authors of Tango XML. 4 agreed to change the license, one refused. The 4 got their work thrown away because it was inextricably intermingled with the 5th. I don't want that to happen to DMD contributors.
When the Boost license is used, one essentially has already agreed to give up their rights to the code. What right is being usefully retained by not doing the CA? If someone has a real issue with that, I am more than willing to talk with them and see if a resolution can be found.
If anyone is still unsure of my intentions, recall that I repeatedly offered to the Tango team that I granted permission to them to use ANY of my D code, and they could relicense their fork of it as they saw fit. I did not oblige them to reciprocate, and they did not, but I'd still do it again.
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