The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

Steven Schveighoffer schveiguy at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 14 12:05:21 PDT 2008


"Sean Kelly" wrote
>> The number of people that have touched the runtime layer of Tango is very 
>> limited.  The upper layers are of no concern for this thread.
>
> So limited, in fact, that the two Tango members who have not given 
> permission to use their code have never actually touched the runtime. I'm 
> very diligent about the "author" labels in the runtime modules, so this is 
> easy to see.  However, the problem is that there is no way to prove this 
> to Walter, and he refuses to even look at Tango without permission from 
> all of us for fear of "taint."  Thus the impasse.

Eh?  As far as I know, if you don't put your name on it, you don't own it. 
If I copyright something by putting a copyright notice on it after I release 
it, it doesn't magically copyright all the previously released versions that 
didn't have that copyright notice.  *Especially* if there is an existing 
copyright notice in the file attributed to someone else, and the file is in 
the project that I am contributing to!  This should be a non-issue.  How 
could you ever "prove" this to anyone without videotaping them typing in the 
code?  I respect that certain Tango authors do not want to have their code 
imported into Phobos, but that should not be a blocker if their code isn't 
in question.

And even if contributors do not want their code in Phobos, too bad so sad. 
They agreed to license their code under the BSD license, and that means 
anyone can use the code for any reason as long as the original authors get 
credit.

> Given Walter's experience with copyright issues I think his caution is 
> certainly well-founded, but it does make things somewhat difficult if all 
> of the contributors to Tango as a whole either can not or will not make 
> their contributions Public Domain for use by Phobos.

I think his caution is a little too overzealous (if this is the reason). 
The whole point of an open-source license is code reuse.  Phobos has an open 
source license.  Tango has an open source license.  Where is the conflict?

-Steve 





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