[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals]

I think the issue is that some future developers will not contribute. Some people just don't want to give up all rights to their work.

I don't know that I care about copyright assignment for DMD either way. Boost is certainly a very permissive license, and I don't see us moving to an incompatible one in the future. On the other hand, you don't know what will happen in the future. Someone future court challenge can make our version of boost unusable for some entire bloc of users, and then we would be stuck. The likelihood of this latter case is astronomically low I think.

As an aside, the tango XML library is not something that we could "just incorporate", so I don't think that's a fair example. It requires tango's entire stream system. And in general, the author of that module had proven not to be amenable to having any of his code in phobos. I think the copyright assignment issue there is moot. Also, note that the requirement on the wiki is for DMD only. It does not specify phobos/druntime contributions have the requirement, and as far as I know, we do not have that authorization from all phobos/druntime contributors.

Is there some compromise we can attain that allows updating the license to some future version of Boost without assigning full copyright to Digital Mars?

-Steve

On Jun 23, 2014, at 11:15 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals <dmd-internals at puremagic.com> wrote:

> Do you have a response for the existing precedents in which valuable work has been wasted?
> 
> More generally (and for everyone), and please don't take this the wrong way as it comes from someone who knows next to nothing about this: I see there's considerable discussion here; what is the larger issue that seems to go unstated? It's entirely fine to want to maintain copyright of one's work, but on the face of it OSS seems to be a poor vehicle for that.
> 
> 
> Andrei