Red Hat's issues in considering the D language

[Madaz Hill via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 13:26:14 UTC, ixid wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 23:08:28 UTC, Andrei 
> Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Hello, a few engineers at Red Hat are taking a look at using 
>> the D language on the desktop and have reached out to us. They 
>> have created a list of issues. We are on the top-level ones, 
>> and of course would appreciate any community help as well.
>>
>> https://gist.github.com/ximion/77dda83a9926f892c9a4fa0074d6bf2b
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Andrei
>
> What is the story over the ownership of DMD's backend? I 
> believe Walter's former employer has some stake in it. Has 
> Walter spoken to them about them donating whatever rights they 
> have to the D foundation?

You have the answer elements here 
https://forum.dlang.org/search?q=backend%20symantec&page=1.
tl;dr: the backend comes from a commercial C++ compiler that was 
written by Bright but commercialized by Symantec. This company 
still owns the rights.

I'd like to add that the windows version would require another 
change so that DMD becomes true FOSS. Unless the 32 bit version 
get dropped away, the standard C library, snn.lib, is even not 
open-sourced (which is a worst than the backend situation) !