Phobos licensing

Anders F Björklund afb at algonet.se
Sat Jun 2 03:04:18 PDT 2007


Bill Baxter wrote:

> 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.

For the record D is not "an official GCC language" because the copyright
on the D front-end won't be signed over to the Free Software Foundation.
(this is a requirement for inclusion in GCC, but doesn't fit with DMD)
Note that e.g. GNU Pascal isn't either, even those it *was* signed over.

So the GDC is now the "GDC D Compiler" rather than the "GNU D Compiler",
but it is still released Free under the GNU General Public License (v2).
The D specification and documentation is NOT included in this, however.
They are: "Copyright (C) 1999-2007 by Digital Mars, All Rights Reserved"

And Phobos is ("mostly") under the zlib/libpng license or Public Domain.
(That is where mostly means: all files except those few with issues...
See Wiki4D: http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?PhobosLicenseIssues )
Whereas Tango, as noted on their web page, has a dual AFL/BSD license.

--anders

PS.
D version() is still "GNU". After all, it's the GNU Compiler Collection.
So you should still be using version(GNU) to check for the GDC compiler.



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