On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 17:50:46 UTC, Seb wrote:
Now that D foundation finally got its own page [1], it's probably time to start this dicussion. Is it safe to assume that the entire Phobos source code (except for the external C modules), belongs to the D foundation?
No, not at all, and you don't need legal experience to recognize that.
Copyright is extremely under-reported for Phobos, in my experience -- authors of significant components of modules do not necessarily add their name to the copyright list or even the author list. But without any paperwork to transfer copyright (and note, not all legal jurisdictions recognize the possibility to do so), copyright still belongs to these authors for the significant parts they have written.
Note, having multiple copyright holders isn't necessarily a problem, given that Phobos is Boost-licensed. It tends to be more an issue for copyleft-licensed works (where having multiple copyright holders can e.g. complicate a license upgrade), or in the case where there is a copyright violation and it is convenient to have a single entity that can launch a claim against the violator (this is why e.g. the Free Software Foundation requests copyright transfer for contributions to their major projects).
But the Boost license makes any copyright violation claim unlikely -- pretty much the only scenario I can see that flying is if somebody redistributes the source code while stripping off the copyright/license/authorship information.
