[phobos] Tango and the new time lib

[Brad Roberts]

I'd much rather never get near legal entanglements/issues, but for 
copyright inifringement to occur there has to be actual copying.  
Parallel evolution is allowed.  Of course, the fundamentally boils down to 
unvalidatable claims on both sides of the issue.

Sigh,
Brad

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Walter Bright wrote:

> One of the Tango developers called me today. There are 5 developers of the
> Tango time library, and they feel that the Phobos time lib submission is close
> enough to theirs to be considered an infringement on their license. The Tango
> license is the BSD license, which does not permit others changing the license,
> such as to Boost which is the Phobos license.
> 
> I am not qualified to compare the two source code bases and make a legal
> determination if there is infringement or not. And quite frankly, I don't want
> to split legal hairs about it against the Tango developers' wishes. I've
> invited the Tango devs to subscribe to this mailing list, and I hope we can
> come to a resolution:
> 
> 1. I think the best solution would be for Tango to relicense the time module
> under the Boost license, which would require the agreement of the five time
> module developers. Then, the Phobos version would include them as authors and
> they'd share in the copyright.
> 
> 2. Next would be if the Tango developers who do agree to the Boost license
> would identify their contributions, those would get authorship & copyright
> credit, etc. Tango developers who do not agree would identify code they
> consider infringing, and that code would be removed from the Phobos version,
> and possibly reimplemented by someone who has not looked at the Tango version.
> 
> 
> The bottom line is the Tango devs should get the final say on what is
> infringing and what isn't, and we won't relicense infringing code into Phobos
> without their explicit permission.
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