ANNOUNCEMENT: GNU-D opens up shop

[Gregor Richards]

Walter Bright wrote:
> For example, Gabe believes there is something wrong with the licensing 
> for D, something that the GPL or LGPL would fix. I don't understand 
> this, as the front end is GPL, gdc is fully GPL, and Phobos is either 
> public domain or a far less restrictive license than even LGPL. I saw a 
> similar comment on Digg. So something is giving the impression that D 
> has a restrictive license.
> 

I think part of this is the fact that GDC usually lags so far behind 
DMD.  This gives the impression that D has DMD as its proprietary 
reference compiler, and GDC as a half-assed attempt at a FOSS one. 
Perhaps I'm coming off a bit harsh.

Anyway, this is nobody's fault.  GDC is complicated and difficult to 
maintain.  Walter has other priorities (and that's good, since if he had 
to deal with GDC, D would never evolve ;) ), and David (the original 
porter) has been somewhat out of contact.  That turned it into sort of a 
political game - nobody wanted to circumvent David, since he's hopefully 
still maintaining GDC, just busy.

All I have to say to you, Walter, is: Don't worry about what people 
think of the licensing.  I'm an FOSS advocate, maybe even a zealot, but 
I love D.  For about 12 hours (the people on IRC can attest to this :P) 
I thought it was unfortunate that the FOSS support was so bad ... until 
I realized that it was nobody's fault, and you've been trying your best 
to keep it healthy without ending up selling all your time to it.  Then 
I made some hacks to GDC, now I have it running against 0.156, and 
DStress is showing some positive results.  With a few more debugging 
sessions, it may be relatively clean.  All that was needed was for 
somebody to take the initiative and not be afraid of offending somebody 
(sorry David ;) )

I'm new to the game, so if anything I've said is inaccurate, I apologize.

  - Gregor Richards