[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Walter Bright via dmd-internals]

On 6/23/2014 9:00 PM, Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals wrote:
>
> A statement saying that any contributors must agree that they give permission for Digital Mars to change the license of their code to any future version of boost license would be sufficient and reasonable, IMO. Remember that if any issues ever arise with boost license, the boost project is sure to fix them, and then we can adopt that new license.
>



LLVM doesn't require copyright assignment, but they admit on their site that 
they are aware that implies the LLVM license can never change. GCC requires 
copyright assignment for larger contributions.

If the copyright holder agrees to such a clause, what rights do they retain as 
copyright holder? Such open-ended clauses may also even be invalid - I've never 
heard of one. Going with copyright assignment is simple and direct. I don't care 
to try and break new legal ground here. I don't care to risk the hard work of 
every contributor to D by trying a novel legal theory.

> By this same logic, we can lament the fact that we can't incorporate libmysql because we didn't get it's owner's permission to license under boost instead of GPL. It's not a fair comparison -- Oracle/Sun did not want to contribute to D, so why should we worry about that?

Because we don't really care about libmysql's license. If it's license becomes incompatible with D's goals, we'll just find another library. It won't destroy D. We can even survive various modules in Phobos needing to be rebooted over licensing issues. It'd be a lot harder to survive dmd being holed below the waterline.