[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals dmd-internals at puremagic.com
Mon Jun 23 23:06:31 PDT 2014


On 6/23/14, 6:44 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> (somehow I failed to hit send on this last night)
>
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei at erdani.com> wrote:
>> Do you have a response for the existing precedents in which valuable work
>> has been wasted?
>
> My understanding is that in each case, work was wasted because it was
> under license A which couldn't be converted to license B.  Boost
> converts to everything else happily, which is why it was picked.
> Therefore this problem does not exist with boost.

Boost doesn't convert to "everything else", particularly because 
"everything" includes licenses that haven't been created yet.

If Boost 1.0 comes with Boost 2.0 which somehow isn't convertible easily 
and obviously from Boost, we'd need to contact everybody "could you 
please let us change the license" etc.

>> More generally (and for everyone), and please don't take this the wrong way
>> as it comes from someone who knows next to nothing about this: I see there's
>> considerable discussion here; what is the larger issue that seems to go
>> unstated? It's entirely fine to want to maintain copyright of one's work,
>> but on the face of it OSS seems to be a poor vehicle for that.
>
> It's not about wanting to maintain my copyright, it's about removing
> an unnecessary hurdle to contribution.  For example, if we require
> copyright assignment I can't submit code that I don't own the
> copyright to, even if it's licence compatible.  Since the move to
> boost means we don't need it, we shouldn't have it.

I think that's a good point. Walter?


Andrei


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