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

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 01:03:01AM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 10/05/12 00:45, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
[...]
> >There are those who will refuse to use D because it's not copyleft.
> >Good luck getting those people on board ;)
> 
> Do you mean there are those who will refuse to use D if it _is_
> copyleft?
> 
> I've never heard of anybody refusing to use a piece of software
> because it had e.g. a permissive licence.  Refuse to contribute,
> possibly, but that's a much more extreme and fringe position than
> the "must be open source!" one.

There are both. Some proprietary developers avoid GPL like the plague
due to the whole "you must publish all your precious source code if you
distribute the binary" issue. Some other developers, admittedly in the
minority compared to the first group, refuse to have anything to do with
non-GPL'd code (or at least, have an OSS-compliant license) because of
idealogical concerns. (For example, you will not be able to convince an
FSF developer to adopt dmd.)


[...]
> Re friends: I always think it's a good idea to have lots, and from
> as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible.  I just don't see
> what _good_ it does to have the backend non-OS, given the possible
> harms it can do.

But that's just crying over spilt milk. Walter has already tried to
change the license, to no avail.


> The short-term benefit is that the status quo allows the team to
> keep improving the language with minimal hassle (not having to learn
> a new backend model or negotiate with Symantec over licensing), but
> that's only a benefit up until the point where D2 stabilizes.
> Beyond that, any advantage vanishes.

So are you proposing that we rewrite the dmd backend with fresh code
that's not encumbered by the current license?


T

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