The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Moritz Warning]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:49:06 -0700, Sean Kelly wrote:

> 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

That issue will probably be sorted out (I hope).
But that don't have to be done right now.

There is no license issue with the Tango runtime,
Work could be started with the runtime any time. - right?
Walter? Sean?