The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Sean Kelly]

Christopher Wright wrote:
> lurker wrote:
>> Hullo,
>>
>> Thats not happening now or recently. The ball its been rotting in 
>> Tango's court for one year plus. This is huge. I might need a couple 
>> days to process this information. Naming names is scary but, ..... is 
>> Walter saying Kris and Lars "MI Is Evil" Igesund deliberately 
>> prevented unification progress?
>>
>> One thing for sure.
>> assert(cat !in bag);
>>
>> -Lurker
> 
> Dozens of people have worked on Tango. Tracking who owns the code is 
> nontrivial, as is contacting some of them. It might be impossible to get 
> a license change cleared.
> 
> Of course, if Walter replaced the Phobos runtime entirely with Tango's, 
> that might not be an issue. But it would involve using the BSD license 
> for those parts.

Tango is actually dual licensed under both the BSD and an artistic 
license.  We had actually considered a public domain license before 
Tango was announced until it was pointed out (by Thomas Kuehne, I 
believe) that copyright laws in some countries don't allow public domain 
as an option and treat such code as if the owner had not licensed it at 
all.  Then we considered the ZLib license because it doesn't require 
attribution like the BSD license, but there were objections for this 
being a nonstandard license.  So we finally settled on a dual BSD and 
artistic license to allow Tango to be the most broadly usable.

To address the second issue, I think the only practical solution is for 
Phobos to run on top of the Tango runtime, quite similar to the Tango / 
Tangobos bundle we already provide.  But this is simply my opinion.


Sean