[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Walter Bright via dmd-internals]

On 6/23/2014 10:59 AM, Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals wrote:
> I think the issue is that some future developers will not contribute. Some people just don't want to give up all rights to their work.

What practical right does one retain when it is licensed under Boost?

Ya know, I don't want to retain rights to D. I originally tried to make it 
public domain, until several people informed me that PD was not a legal concept 
in many countries. Boost was the next best thing. I want to continue to make D 
as available as possible, and that means the license may need to be adjusted in 
the future. If contributors do not share those goals, then yes, they should 
reconsider contributing to D.

I do understand the issue of retaining credit for one's work. But I believe that 
the github commit history amply supports that goal, and is one of the reasons I 
am very much in favor of using github for D.


> I don't know that I care about copyright assignment for DMD either way. Boost is certainly a very permissive license, > and I don't see us moving to an incompatible one in the future. On the other hand, you don't know what will happen in > the future. Someone future court challenge can make our version of boost unusable for some entire bloc of users, and > then we would be stuck. The likelihood of this latter case is astronomically low I think.

> As an aside, the tango XML library is not something that we could "just incorporate", so I don't think that's a fair > example. It requires tango's entire stream system.


I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect the stream system dependency would 
be easily converted to ranges.


>   And in general, the author of that module had proven not to be amenable to having any of his code in phobos.

There were multiple authors of Tango XML, and one did not want to change the 
license. So all the other contributors had their code thrown under the bus as 
well. Note that many bits of Tango did wind up in Phobos, because all the 
contributors of those bits did agree. That's the big problem - one person can 
hold the whole thing hostage, intentionally or simply by being unavailable. Do 
we really want that for dmd?


>   I think the copyright assignment issue there is moot. Also, note that the requirement on the wiki is for DMD only. It does not specify phobos/druntime contributions have the requirement, and as far as I know, we do not have that authorization from all phobos/druntime contributors.
>
> Is there some compromise we can attain that allows updating the license to some future version of Boost without assigning full copyright to Digital Mars?
>
>

The entity that can change the license is the copyright holder.