[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Walter Bright via dmd-internals]

On 6/24/2014 5:19 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>
>    C.6) You wrote earlier that "the credit has a lot of value to one's 
> professional career", and I couldn't agree more. Yet at the same time, you are 
> asking people for the permission to take it away from them. Regardless of 
> whether you actually intend to do that or not, the simple possibility makes 
> this a rude thing to do without a good reason.
>


I find this discussion rather exhausting. But I want to respond strongly to this 
point. The CA simply does not take credit away from a contributor. Copyright 
status has nothing to do with who did the work. For example, a book author 
assigns copyright to the publisher, but nobody imagines that the publisher wrote 
the book.

Most companies do attempt to hide from the outside world who did what. But this 
project is not like that. We use github, and GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE 
is one of the primary motivators for that. In fact, the source code to DMD does 
not break out who did what lines of code and is entitled to credit, so even with 
no CA, you'd STILL have to examine github to see what's what.

I'm proud that we're using github which enables ALL contributors to get public 
credit for their work, automatically. Copyright status neither adds nor 
subtracts from that.

I'm not asking for CA for phobos, because I think that any issues can be worked 
around, i.e. the modules are replaceable. This is not so true of DMDFE. Trying 
to unwind a major contributor's work is a completely daunting task. I don't want 
to ever be faced with such a disaster. I don't have a well-financed phalanx of 
lawyers to bulldoze past such problems. And would the OTHER contributors to DMD 
care to have their good work made useless because one other contributor is no 
longer willing or available to give their consent to a change? The worst thing 
that could happen to DMD contributors is to have their work abandoned. Me, I 
don't want to expend my life doing things that would be abandoned, and I expect 
other open source contributors to feel the same way.

As I recall, there were 5 authors of Tango XML. 4 agreed to change the license, 
one refused. The 4 got their work thrown away because it was inextricably 
intermingled with the 5th. I don't want that to happen to DMD contributors.

When the Boost license is used, one essentially has already agreed to give up 
their rights to the code. What right is being usefully retained by not doing the 
CA? If someone has a real issue with that, I am more than willing to talk with 
them and see if a resolution can be found.

If anyone is still unsure of my intentions, recall that I repeatedly offered to 
the Tango team that I granted permission to them to use ANY of my D code, and 
they could relicense their fork of it as they saw fit. I did not oblige them to 
reciprocate, and they did not, but I'd still do it again.