my opinion on secrecy of D license

Hasan Aljudy hasan.aljudy at gmail.com
Thu May 25 09:37:42 PDT 2006


This kind of legal crap is never clear anyway. Just deal with it!

Mike Parker wrote:
> arnuld wrote:
> 
>> i just started to learn c++, then i heard about "D". it looked good. i 
>> searched
>> your web-site for information, i thought i should start learning it 
>> but you are
>> secretive about exact information of your licence. i tried to search your
>> web-site for license of D but concluded that you do not want to tell 
>> openly how
>> exactly you licensed D. If you want to keep D under a ``Proprietary 
>> license'',
>> then just go ahead and do it. what do you fear?. if you want to keep D
>> open-source, then go ahead and do it.
>>
>> -----------------------
>> you have made things confusing like this:
>>
>> Q. Will D be open source?
>>
>> A: The front end for D is open source, and the source comes with the 
>> compiler.
>> There is a  SourceForge project underway to create a Gnu 
>> implementation of D
>> from this.
>>
>>> it is like :
>>> Q: what's your name?
>>> A: yeah, i am hungry.
>>
>>
>>
>> Q: Which parts of the Digital Mars D implementation are Free software? 
>> [Apr 04]
>>
>> The DMD front-end source is available under dual ( GPL and Artistic) 
>> license.
>> Phobos, the D standard library, is now licensed under a zlib/libpng 
>> license
>> unless the individual file specifies otherwise. The DMD compiler, 
>> back-end and
>> libraries are licensed non-distributable under a DigitalMars license. 
>> The D
>> language specification and accompanying documents are similarly 
>> copyrighted to
>> DigitalMars. -- JustinCalvarese, additions by AndersFBjörklund
>>
>>> this time Q has put limit on the answer.
>>
>>
>>
>> The D language comes free. You can download the compiler (DMD) and 
>> standard
>> library (Phobos) in a package that includes the Windows and the Linux 
>> (x86)
>> system.
>>
>>> even Microsoft distributes its Media layer free & that is not FLOSS.
>>
>>
>> ----
>>
>> i am not asking you to make D OpenSource, i am asking you to be clear. 
>> Keeping
>> users of D confused will not make things better and only making things
>> technically better does not guarntee any success. see WINDOWS, the 
>> much buggier
>> OS, if not most, *but* it is a success. the richest person on this 
>> planet made
>> his fortune not by selling airplanes, rails or petroleum but by 
>> selling  most
>> buggy OS. *technical* matter (at OS level) doensn'n play here. what do 
>> you
>> think?
>>
>> it is just a logical explanation. be clear on D, please.
>>
>> just a user.
>>
>> thanks for your precious time.
> 
> 
> There's nothing secretive about it. Everything you need to know is 
> answered right there in the second question you quoted. If that's not 
> clear enough for you, I don't know what is. The front-end is open source 
> under dual GPL and Artistic licenses, Phobos is licenses under a 
> zlib/libpng license, while the compiler and the rest of the back-end are 
> proprietary. What's the problem?



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