Copyright for Phobos to D Foundation

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 17:50:46 UTC, Seb wrote:
> Now that D foundation finally got its own page [1], it's 
> probably time to start this dicussion.
> Is it safe to assume that the entire Phobos source code (except 
> for the external C modules), belongs to the D foundation?

No, not at all, and you don't need legal experience to recognize 
that.

Copyright is extremely under-reported for Phobos, in my 
experience -- authors of significant components of modules do not 
necessarily add their name to the copyright list or even the 
author list.  But without any paperwork to transfer copyright 
(and note, not all legal jurisdictions recognize the possibility 
to do so), copyright still belongs to these authors for the 
significant parts they have written.

Note, having multiple copyright holders isn't necessarily a 
problem, given that Phobos is Boost-licensed.  It tends to be 
more an issue for copyleft-licensed works (where having multiple 
copyright holders can e.g. complicate a license upgrade), or in 
the case where there is a copyright violation and it is 
convenient to have a single entity that can launch a claim 
against the violator (this is why e.g. the Free Software 
Foundation requests copyright transfer for contributions to their 
major projects).

But the Boost license makes any copyright violation claim 
unlikely -- pretty much the only scenario I can see that flying 
is if somebody redistributes the source code while stripping off 
the copyright/license/authorship information.