Give me a break

Walter Bright newshound1 at digitalmars.com
Wed Jul 1 01:48:48 PDT 2009


Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> I know _Walter_ had a license-related reason for deliberately not
> looking at Tango.

Tango is under the BSD license, which requires attribution in binaries 
for linking with it. This is what the license says, regardless of how it 
is interpreted. I don't feel that can be ignored.

The problem with me looking at it and then contributing to Phobos is 
that I can be accused of violating the BSD license. They are so similar 
it is almost impossible for there not be some sort of taint like that. 
I've been developing software for 30 years now, and I've found that the 
best defense against such accusations is to never look at them. (And 
yes, I've been grilled by lawyers.) It's the same reason I never look at 
gcc source code.

I have asked the Tango team for a specific reciprocal cross-licensing 
agreement from Tango to Phobos (I have provided one so that Tango can 
incorporate whatever they want from Phobos). The only ones willing to do 
so were Sean and Don who have incorporated their Tango contributions 
into Phobos and relicensed them.

Sean looked around for a new license for druntime, and settled on using 
the Boost license which doesn't have the BSD problems and is designed 
for maximum utility for any purpose one may want to use it for.

Sean's druntime project is intended to be the core library that both 
Phobos and Tango can be built upon. It is based on Tango's core that 
Sean had written. Phobos was changed to work with it.

I've fixed the bugs identified to me as blocking Tango from working with D2.

If there's more I can do to make this work, I would like to know what 
that is.



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