On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 20:24:31 UTC, David Nadlinger
wrote:
On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 11:12:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
And actually, he'd risk legal problems if he did, because he
doesn't want anyone to be able to accuse him of taking code
from gcc or llvm.
That's a silly strawman, and you should know better than
putting that forward as an argument by now.
Walter is of course free to do whatever he pleases, and I would
totally understand if his reason was just that it's hard to
give something up you've worked on for a long time.
But please don't make up argument trying to rationalize
whatever personal decision somebody else made. You could
literally copy LLVM source code into your application and sell
it as a closed-source product without risking any copyright
problems (if you comply with the very modest attribution clause
of the license).
It's not a strawman. Walter has state previously that he's
explicitly avoided looking at the source code for other compilers
like gcc, because he doesn't want anyone to be able to accuse him
of stealing code, copyright infringement, etc. Now, that's
obviously much more of a risk with gcc than llvm given their
respective licenses, but it is a position that Walter has taken
when the issue has come up, and it's not something that I'm
making up.
Now, if Walter were willing to give up on the dmd backend
entirely, then presumably, that wouldn't be a problem anymore
regardless of license issues, but he still has dmc, which uses
the same backend, so I very much doubt that that's going to
happen.
- Jonathan M Davis
