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

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 10/05/12 03:14, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> If nothing else, because Walter would be unable to work on it. He avoids
> looking at the source for any other compilers, because doing so could cause
> him legal issues when working on dmd/dmc's backend, which he does
> professionally. And given that Walter has worked on the backend for over 20
> years, I can't imagine that he's going to be all that excited at the prospect
> of throwing it away in favor of another one.

Is that an issue for LLVM, which is BSD-licensed?  I will understand if the 
answer is, "I don't care, I don't even want to risk it."

> Once the front-end has stabilized (and it's getting there), it should become a
> non-issue, because then even if gdc and ldc are a version or two behind, it
> won't affect anywhere near as much (it will also likely become easier at that
> point for the gdc and ldc devs to keep them up-to-date).

Yes, I agree.  That's why I suggested as an alternative trying to synchronize 
releases of DMD, GDC and LDC so that they are always feature-equivalent, and 
endorsing all 3 as official implementations of the reference standard.