Joseph S. Myers wrote:
On Mon, 8 Nov 2010, Walter Bright wrote:
Who do I need to talk to in order to resolve the various licensing issues so
this becomes possible?
The FSF, via the Steering Committee, via this list. The standard
assignment and licensing policies are as described in the Mission
Statement <http://gcc.gnu.org/gccmission.html>. Any special arrangement
like that for the Go front end (where part providing the GCC interface is
assigned to the FSF and maintained in the GCC tree and part that could be
used with other back ends is maintained externally with third-party
copyright) needs specific approval. (Note that the Go front end does not
yet achieve the level of separation achieved by Ada, for example; there
are plenty of uses of GCC's tree interfaces in the gofrontend/ directory
that mean portability to other back ends is more theory than reality.)
The D specific part of gdc is already GPL, it's just copyrighted by
Digital Mars. I understand the copyright must be reassigned to the FSF.
Is it possible to fork the code, and assign copyright of one fork to the
FSF and leave the other copyrighted by Digital Mars?
In general I'd like to encourage maintainers of separate front ends - not
limited to D - to work towards merging them into FSF GCC and maintaining
them there; additional front ends help improve the quality of the core
language-independent code, and no doubt GNU/Linux distributors would be
glad to avoid the complexities of patching out-of-tree front ends into
their GCC packages. Front ends do of course need to pass technical review
and do things in the ways that are considered current good practice for
front ends instead of being gratuitously different, but when maintainers
are ready to follow current good technical and licensing practice I think
having them in FSF GCC benefits both the front ends and GCC.
Sounds sensible.
