Phobos licensing

[Bill Baxter]

Ant wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Phobos' std.loader contains this language in the source file:
>>
>>  *   (ii) Any derived versions of this software (howsoever modified)
>>  *        remain the sole property of Synesis Software.
>>
>> It doesn't define 'derived' so I suspect this could be interpreted 
>> quite broadly by the courts, particularly given the "howsoever 
>> modified" bit which seems to be saying "if you were thinking of 
>> interpreting 'derived' narrowly -- DON'T."
>>
>> I don't think draconian licensing terms like these belong in the 
>> standard library.  I suggest we ask Synesis for more liberal licensing 
>> terms or else remove the file from Phobos until it can be reimplemented.
>>
>> --bb
> 
> I asked that question 3 years, 1 months and 3 days ago.

Glad you're keeping track. ;-)
It was actually brought to my attention by an old NG post somewhere that 
I stumbled across with regard to making D an official GCC language. 
That was also a few years old.

Looks like std.windows.registry is also affected in addition to std.loader.
Interestingly neither module appears in the online docs.  So maybe we're 
  not supposed to consider these modules "official" Phobos members?

> I moved to tango now.

Tango doesn't seem to have either a windows registry module or a dynamic 
library loader.  So if those licenses are your only worry you can just 
delete those two files from your copy of Phobos.

I haven't looked too closely at it, but what's there in std.loader 
doesn't look very difficult to come up with a replacement for.  It seems 
to just be a wrapper around dlopen/dlsym and the equivalent Win32 thing. 
  There are probably a dozen different implementations of similar (and 
some more complete) things out on the web.

I'm jumping the gun here, but here are some thoughts on where one might 
look for a replacement:  Many things that come to mind have a GPL 
license (FOX,GTK,Qt), and so are out.  But wxWidgets has a dynlib module 
with I think an acceptable license,
http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/stable/wx_wxdynamiclibrary.html#wxdynamiclibrary
however, the code is pretty messy. Some of the code is here,
http://cvs.wxwidgets.org/viewcvs.cgi/wxWidgets/src/common/dynlib.cpp?rev=1.118&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
but apparently the Unix and Windows specific versions are elsewhere.

But it's jumping the gun because I suspect Matthew Wilson might be 
willing to change the license.  At least I'm guessing so, because 
std.openrj is also by him, and it has a reasonable license.

--bb