Masahiro Nakagawa and SHOO invited to join Phobos developers

[Walter Bright]

Moritz Warning wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:24:22 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Moritz Warning wrote:
> [..]
>>> Maybe you can talk to the Tango devs to clear up this matter?
>> I suggest that the Tango devs convert the Tango modules that can get
>> full agreement by their respective devs be converted to the Boost
>> license. The Boost license is free of the legal problems that BSD has,
>> and is compatible with the Phobos license.
> 
> As far as I have heard, Tango changed it's license to be compatible with 
> Phobos in the first place.

Tango is originally based on Phobos code, and I gave explicit permission for it 
to be incorporated into the Tango project & BSD license, but the BSD license 
does not permit code to flow the other way without the explicit permission of 
the Tango devs.

Some code has moved back to Phobos, in particular Sean & Don's work, because 
Sean & Don are the developers of that code and it is their prerogative to do 
what they please with it.


> But Phobos then changed it's license and now 
> it's incompatible again. 
> What were the reasons for Phobos to change the license?
> I suspect is was discussed before, do you have a link?

Phobos was formerly actually a collection of different licenses, Phobos 1.0 
still is. Some was public domain.

The reason it was switched (for Phobos 2) to Boost was:

1. Boost is corporate and lawyer approved, making it a no-brainer for 
commercial, professional use of Phobos

2. Boost is the most liberal license we were able to find

3. Public domain is not recognized in many countries

4. Having one license for Phobos makes it much easier to manage and deploy

The perennial problem with the BSD license is the binary attribution clause. 
Tango believes it has a solution to this by embedding the appropriate string in 
object.d, but I don't know if this has been legally tested and it still puts a 
constant burden of explanation on the Tango team.

It's just a problem that I can see no reason to adopt.