On 06/22/14 15:13, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> You are passing copyright to DigitalMars for all contributions anyway, Boost or proprietary.

Not true in general. Or are you saying that Walter requires copyright assignment before merging code? If that would be the case then this would be an even bigger problem. (Hmm, the GCC integration makes the situation much more complicated)

> What is potential danger to be aware of? I think I am simply not that educated in legal matters on this topic.

Let's just say I'm paranoid. I don't want to discourage anybody from contributing, so I don't want to list "potential dangers", That would only lead to discussions about how real or serious they are; it's a very subjective matter.

artur

On Sunday, 22 June 2014 at 15:01:57 UTC, Artur Skawina via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 06/22/14 15:13, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> You are passing copyright to DigitalMars for all contributions anyway, Boost or proprietary.
>
> Not true in general. Or are you saying that Walter requires copyright
> assignment before merging code? If that would be the case then this
> would be an even bigger problem. (Hmm, the GCC integration makes the
> situation much more complicated)

All DMD source files mention "Copyright (c) *** by Digital Mars". As far as I understand that implies that any pull request that does not explicitly mentions copyright does assignment automatically. Which totally makes sense because source base with distributed copyright ownership is extremely inflexible to maintain, to the point where it is better to simply reject such pull request than to deal with it.

On 6/22/2014 9:08 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> All DMD source files mention "Copyright (c) *** by Digital Mars". As far as I
> understand that implies that any pull request that does not explicitly mentions
> copyright does assignment automatically. Which totally makes sense because
> source base with distributed copyright ownership is extremely inflexible to
> maintain, to the point where it is better to simply reject such pull request
> than to deal with it.

Copyright assignment is required in other larger projects, like Linux and gcc.

On Sunday, 22 June 2014 at 16:08:58 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> All DMD source files mention "Copyright (c) *** by Digital Mars". As far as I understand that implies that any pull request that does not explicitly mentions copyright does assignment automatically. Which totally makes sense because source base with distributed copyright ownership is extremely inflexible to maintain, to the point where it is better to simply reject such pull request than to deal with it.

Simply sticking that notice at the top of a source file does not imply copyright assignment.  At best, submitting a pull request might imply that you acquiesce to the open-source license of the project, but some would say even that isn't certain.  This is why companies like google explicitly make you fill out a Contributor License Agreement before they will accept patches from you, though theirs doesn't require copyright assignment:

https://developers.google.com/open-source/cla/individual

Since Artur is being so evasive, I believe he's talking about the same reasons why Walter purposely won't even look at llvm code, which is basically BSD-licensed.  Any time you can say you haven't even looked at any outside code, let alone contributed to it, you save yourself legal hassles.  I think he's saying that many potential contributors will see the legal uncertainty from dmd's licenses and just pass on contributing to dmd.

I don't know how real a concern this is, as I've thankfully never had to deal with these copyright-tainting issues.

On Sunday, 22 June 2014 at 18:47:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Copyright assignment is required in other larger projects, like Linux and gcc.

Not Linux, no.

David

On 6/22/2014 2:02 PM, Joakim wrote:
> Since Artur is being so evasive, I believe he's talking about the same reasons
> why Walter purposely won't even look at llvm code, which is basically
> BSD-licensed.  Any time you can say you haven't even looked at any outside code,
> let alone contributed to it, you save yourself legal hassles.  I think he's
> saying that many potential contributors will see the legal uncertainty from
> dmd's licenses and just pass on contributing to dmd.
>
> I don't know how real a concern this is, as I've thankfully never had to deal
> with these copyright-tainting issues.

My main issue is simply protecting DMD from someone, years later, asserting some sort of claim over it. Also, I need to be able to deal with issues as they come up, and some contributors may be unreachable (and this has happened multiple times).

With copyright assignment, these issues go away.

I don't know why any contributors need to be concerned about the Boost license, or the copyright assignment, affecting them. As far as credit goes, the github repository provides ample credit to who did what, and in fact I encourage people to use their real names on it so that they get the credit they're due.