[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals]

On 6/23/14, 5:25 PM, Walter Bright via dmd-internals wrote:
> 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 concur. If the contributor holding the copyright disappears, we can't 
change the license anymore. If the contributor holding the copyright has 
a falling with D, they can do harm by suddenly changing license for 
their part of Phobos. I don't see any good for anyone out of this - only 
the right to damage D in the future if they so want.

> 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.

Don't forget the "Authors:" tag. In a few cases we've erred on the side 
of more credit, e.g. list as authors people who contributed only a small 
fraction of a module.

>> 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?

There was the same problem with Tango dates and times. We couldn't even 
look at the respective Tango code - and how many ways can one really 
implement the classic dates and times algorithms? - because of 
exhausting scrutiny from people who were apparently looking to pick a fight.

>> 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.

And that's where the potential harm lies if we federalize copyright in 
Phobos.


Andrei