Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 06:53:37PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, May 10, 2012 00:49:17 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> > On 10/05/12 00:41, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> > > I do think, though, that it may be something that starts to bite
> > > as the community scales up in size.
> > 
> > I'll add one more thing on this: you probably don't know whether or
> > not you're missing out, as there's no real way you can measure the
> > number of people who would like to engage with D but don't because
> > of the licensing issues.
> > 
> > There _might_ be a surprise waiting the day the announcement is
> > made: "reference D compiler now fully open source".
> 
> But since that will never happen, it's a moot issue. It doesn't really
> matter if we would have had 10 times as many people contributing
> (which I very much doubt), Walter can't change the backend's license,
> so we're stuck with how things are. There's really no point in arguing
> about how it affects us (be it positively or negatively), since we
> can't do anything about it.
[...]

Dumb question: what prevents someone from rewriting dmd's backend with
new code that isn't entangled by the previous license?


T

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