[OT] open-source license issues
Steven Schveighoffer
schveiguy at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 12 12:14:20 PDT 2011
On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:54:19 -0400, Jérôme M. Berger <jeberger at free.fr>
wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> This, BTW, is why BSD is not acceptable for Phobos.
>> The requirement to put the license in the documentation (even if you
>> distribute binary-only) is no good.
>
> Have you looked at the license agreement for most Microsoft
> products? or most major video games? They all have some line saying
> that "this product uses software developed by such and such", which
> is no less than the BSD requires...
Right, but not because they used C, C++, Java, or whatever, to develop
it. It's because they *chose* to include that BSD-licensed library. If
that library is a part of Phobos, *any* D-developed program will require
that attribution, which means if you don't want to have that attribution
requirement, you will choose another language.
I'm not saying BSD is bad, or (L)GPL is bad, they are fine licenses to
choose for any OSS project you want, but they are not appropriate for the
core standard library.
Of course, there are exceptions. For example glibc is practically
guaranteed to be on any Linux system, so having it be LGPL works perfectly
fine -- there is no need to redistribute it. On the other hand, having to
use the client's libc can run into bad compatibility issues in some cases.
-Steve
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