Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 00:49:17 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 10/05/12 00:41, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> > I do think, though, that it may be something that starts to bite as the
> > community scales up in size.
> 
> I'll add one more thing on this: you probably don't know whether or not
> you're missing out, as there's no real way you can measure the number of
> people who would like to engage with D but don't because of the licensing
> issues.
> 
> There _might_ be a surprise waiting the day the announcement is made:
> "reference D compiler now fully open source".

But since that will never happen, it's a moot issue. It doesn't really matter 
if we would have had 10 times as many people contributing (which I very much 
doubt), Walter can't change the backend's license, so we're stuck with how 
things are. There's really no point in arguing about how it affects us (be it 
positively or negatively), since we can't do anything about it.

But gdc and ldc _do_ exist, so for the really picky people, there are fully 
FOSS options. And as the front-end stabilizes, which backend you use should 
matter less and less, so it should become less and less of an issue.

- Jonathan M Davis