D compiler as part of GCC

[Brad Roberts]

On 1/23/2010 4:15 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>> Walter Bright, el 23 de enero a las 12:54 me escribiste:
>>> Jerry Quinn wrote:
>>>> Walter Bright Wrote:
>>>>> Will they take a fork of the dmd source, such that they own the
>>>>> copyright to the fork and Digital Mars still has copyright to
>>>>> the original?
>>>> Hi, Walter,
>>>>
>>>> The answer appears to be yes:
>>>>
>>>> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-01/msg00430.html
>>>>
>>>> Jerry
>>>>
>>> That's great news. I suppose I should look over the forms they talk
>>> about!
>>
>> Great news indeed! Since DMD FE is GPL I think it won't be any trouble to
>> fold in the new changes back to GDC as they did (and LDC too), so it
>> won't
>> be really a *fork*, right?
> 
> Well, still I won't be supporting gdc directly. It would mean a team
> that would be willing to take new DMD FE updates and fold them into GDC,
> and then follow whatever gcc's build and release conventions are.

I don't think you got the answer you were looking for.  You got an answer to a
different question.  If you assign the copyright over to the FSF, they then own
the code.  You'd have a license to use it as you like in return, but you would
no longer be the owner.

Additionally, as pointed out in the gcc@ thread, contributions coming into the
gcc tree wouldn't have anything other than the gpl license attached to them and
that would likely make them problematic to re-distribute from your tree with the
dual gpl/artistic license.

In simpler words, this is still far from straightforward.

I'd still love for there to be fewer split efforts on the compiler front, so I
do encourage trying to find a workable solution.. but tread carefully.

Later,
Brad