On 10/05/12 21:01, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Thursday, May 10, 2012 10:16:10 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
Is that an issue for LLVM, which is BSD-licensed? I will understand if the
answer is, "I don't care, I don't even want to risk it."
You'll have to talk to Walter if you want to know what exactly he is willing
and isn't willing to do or what he can and can't do.
Sure. I was just not sure if this particular suggestion had been raised and
answered by Walter before.
But if someone is going to consider dmd's backend's license to be an issue,
they don't know enough to understand the situation properly, and I wouldn't
expect anything with gdc and ldc to change that, since they'd _still_ have to
know more to understand the situation properly. The fact that gdc and ldc
_exist_ should solve the problem already, but we still get FUD. We'd still be
getting FUD even if dmd's backend _were_ changed to the GPL, simply because it
wasn't before.
The difference is that with an OS-licensed backend, you can counter FUD with one
line -- "Here's the licence". Without it, you have to go into the extended
discussion we've just had, with so many opportunities for misunderstanding and
confusion. And yes, D would probably continue to suffer some FUD in the short
term even with a backend licence change, but not in the long term -- look at the
history of Qt for a comparison.
GDC and LDC solve _one_ problem -- the problem of developing D programs using
purely open source tools. But they leave remaining the problem of contributing
to the core of D using purely open source.
That's not a problem that is urgent to address right now but it is a problem
that probably needs to be addressed at some point.
The situation can't really be fixed, so I don't see much point
in trying to spend a lot of time and effort trying to fix it.
Not for now, certainly. I do think, though, that it's worth having the detail
of the issues involved laid out and understood. That allows for some longer
term planning and thinking around possible solutions.
