[OT] open-source license issues

[Steven Schveighoffer]

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