dmd front end now switched to Boost license

[Leandro Lucarella via Digitalmars-d-announce]

Nick Sabalausky, el 14 de June a las 02:06 me escribiste:
> >>It's probably nice to have less restrictive license, but what we aim
> >>to achieve with that?
> >>
> >>Make commercial companies contribute to DMD more freely?
> >>    There is no problem even with GPL.
> >>Let them build and sell their own products out of DMDFE?
> >>    Highly unlikely to be a profitable anyway, and we'd better get
> >>back the patches.
> >
> >Wild guess: DMD in fedora, debian et al. repositories ?
> 
> I doubt it. First, it's the backend that's not technically OSI,
> frontend was (apparently) GPL. Second, I can't imagine any Linux
> distro rejecting GPL - they'd have to boot the kernel and core
> utils, too.
> 
> Boost has kinda become the favored "D" license anyway, Phobos etc.,
> so it probably has a lot to do with that. Kinda weird to have the
> compiler and stdlib under different licenses.

Not really, the standard library is included into user code (because of
the templates), and that's the reason why it needs to be under a very
permissive license. The compiler, on the other hand, doesn't, and one
could agree is good to force people wanting to build products using the
compiler FE to contribute changes back. I guess the main purpose of this
is encourage proprietary tools based on the FE, but if that's the case,
there are better licenses for this, like the LGPL, which let proprietary
tools to link code against the DMD FE without having to release their
code under a free license.

With Boost, anyone can create a tool with DMD FE, improve the DMD FE in
the process and distribute the modified DMD FE without offering the
source code of the DMD FE to the received, which kind of sucks. In
practice I guess not many people would do that, but I think it would
have been a nice gesture to ask contributors how they feel about this
license change, even when I think technically you are somehow giving up
your rights to Digital Mars when contributing to DMDFE and thus they can
do whatever they want with the code, legally speaking.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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