visual c++ licensing issues

[Stephen Jones]

Isn't the point that Microsoft have just illustrated that they 
intend tightening their grip over the development tools, in which 
case the future viability of D as open source is jeopardized; if 
you want to program D you will have to obtain some Microsoft 
license to access the linker required to use Windows 64 bit SDK.

As for being able to generate D programs with just the Windows 
SDK, I was lead to understand D programming on 64 bit Windows 
platforms requires Visual C++ linker and this linker can only be 
got by obtaining a Visual Studio, and that the last Enterprise 
and truly free version of Studio is 2010 which presumably will 
not keep pace with future Windows developments (I might be wrong 
on this, if for example the linker remains the same irrespective 
of changes in the SDK).