zortech - symantec - digital mars

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 06, 2018 03:07:02 rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> The comment is correct, dmd was indeed closed source for a good number
> of years.
>
> I believe it was Brad (from my hazy memory) who when joined got it
> opened up (and had the bug tracker installed too).

Regardless of that though, most of the complaints about dmd's backend not
being open source have been because the license wasn't open source even
though the source was available, and far too many folks seem to have thought
that the entire compiler was closed source when the front-end was actually
open - to the point that it was relicensed so that gdc could be part of gcc,
and that didn't need to get Symantec involved at all.

Fortunately, it's all Boost now, so none of this is a problem anymore, but
historically, there have been a lot of misunderstandings about how open dmd
has been due to the fact that the backend wasn't fully open source.

- Jonathan M Davis