[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Walter Bright via dmd-internals]

On 6/24/2014 6:06 AM, Leandro Lucarella via dmd-internals wrote:
> Yeah, that's the real way to go if the goal is to protect D's interests.
> Walter could go bananas too, or die. I know at this point this option
> might be unrealistic and the most practical solution is to keep giving
> the rights to Walter/DigitalMars, but I can definitely understand people
> being concerned about giving up their rights to a private company that
> has no legal obligation to do what's best for D instead of its own
> interests.

I've been doing this for 14 years now. If I was acting in bad faith on this, I 
suppose it would have been obvious by now. 14 years is quite the "long con" :-)

Not only that, switching DMD from GPL to Boost seems to be going in the wrong 
direction if I had bad intentions, as that definitely involves me giving up as 
much legal right to the code as possible. Nobody was pressuring me to do this 
(which a bit surprised me), I did it because it is the right thing for the D 
community.


>
> Then, there are a bunch of very serious projects that have settled with
> a license and don't require copyright assignment, like LLVM (which I
> think have a similar position to D in terms of being freely available
> for any use). The FSF asks for copyright assignment not to be able to
> change the license in the future (for that reason they say in the
> license that you can use any newer GPL version, at your choice), but for
> litigation reasons, to be able to enforce the license, which I guess is
> not a concern for D if you basically want to have it effectively as
> Public Domain.

Litigation works the other way, too. Someone could sue Digital Mars over the code.