[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Leandro Lucarella via dmd-internals]

Walter Bright via dmd-internals, el 23 de June a las 23:33 me escribiste:
> 
> 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.

As I said, that's for a different reason, to be able to change the
license they just do this:

"This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation, EITHER VERSION 3 OF THE LICENSE, OR (AT YOUR
OPTION) ANY LATER VERSION."
(capitalization added by me :)


> 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.
> 
> 
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-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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