The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I have explained this to the main Tango developers on multiple
>>> occasions. It is their right and privilege to license Tango as they see
>>> fit, and I respect that and so have not spoken out on it before. But in
>>> this thread I am being cast as a roadblock, which I feel is a little
>>> unfair, so I will loosen my tongue and speak up a bit :-)
>>
>> And we have on equally many occasions told you that the code you need is
>> available. :)
> 
> I respectfully disagree. The Tango team has stopped short of providing a 
> license to use the Tango code in Phobos with a reciprocal agreement that 
> allows it to be distributed under the Phobos license. I also cannot 
> accept something vague, it has to be explicit.
> 
> I've dealt with lawyers many times, and spelling it out directly and 
> explicitly avoids a lot of future potential problems. Furthermore, if 
> Phobos has a wishy-washy legal pedigree, corporate lawyers will not buy 
> off on allowing D to be used in their companies.

Personally, I've never met a corporate lawyer who would authorize use of 
Public Domain code, for two reasons.  First, the assumption seems to be 
that PD code is really actually owned by someone and no one knows who 
that is.  Second, lawyers (and build teams even moreso) very much like 
having a responsible party, even if the license absolves the author of 
any direct responsibility for code issues as most licenses do.

Case in point, I've never been able to use Boost at any of my previous 
jobs because the licensing scheme is too open.  Also, I've had to fight 
tooth and nail to use BSD licensed code at work because of the 
attribution requirement (that the library must be mentioned in 
documentation accompanying any shipped product).

All of the above was considered when working out a licensing scheme for 
Tango.  We wanted a license that would allow Tango to be used by 
everyone, first and foremost.  I could never have done that with Phobos 
under the current license.

> This issue must be settled in advance of looking at Tango, not after the 
> fact.

The contention is about the user code, I believe.  You have asked for 
blanket permission to incorporate all of Tango as Public Domain code in 
Phobos even though the only portion of the code you seem to care about 
is the runtime.  As the sole maintainer of the runtime I have long since 
given you permission to use that portion of the code as you see fit, but 
this is obviously not sufficient.  I honestly have no idea how we can 
proceed any further, given that I don't expect other Tango contributors 
to agree to release their (user) code into the Public Domain.


Sean