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

[Artur Skawina]

On 05/10/12 01:04, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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?

Something must, as otherwise there would ay least already be llvm and gcc
backends. Oh wait...

artur