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

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 10/05/12 01:14, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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.)

Well, "OSS-compliant licence" covers a LOT of options, not all of them 
GPL-compatible, not all of them copyleft.  I can't see there being a huge 
problem if DMD were distributed under a permissive license such as Apache, 
BSD/MIT or Boost.  Yes, there might be some hardcore people who would like a 
strong copyleft approach, but that's a much smaller number of people than the 
numbers who care about it being a licence that meets the FSF criteria for a free 
licence.

As for the "avoid GPL" folks, you may already be buggered there. :-)  Or you 
could multi-license so that everyone's happy.  (MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licence?)

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

I think there are a number of possible solutions, including not just a rewrite 
but also just blessing either GDC or LDC as the reference implementation once 
their D2 support has reached maturity/parallel with DMD.  I'd favour LDC, to 
avoid the negative associations some people have with the GNU project.