> i am not asking you to make D OpenSource, i am asking you to be clear. Keeping
> users of D confused will not make things better and only making things

Nobody is confused about the license. libphobos is completely free and that is the only thing "user" should care about, because that is the only thing that might be deployed together with executable (or linked together).

Dejan Lekic wrote:
> 
>> i am not asking you to make D OpenSource, i am asking you to be clear. Keeping
>> users of D confused will not make things better and only making things
> 
> 
> Nobody is confused about the license. libphobos is completely free and that is the only thing "user" should care about, because that is the only thing that might be deployed together with executable (or linked together).

Wrong.

Everybody is confused about the license. Except for the old-timers in this newsgroup.

I wrote a draft for Walter a couple of weeks ago, so he'd put it on the DM website. PROMINENTLY. Until he does that, we'll just have to answer all these (IMHO valid) questions over and over again.

georg

PS: the draft was carefully thought-out, and should be usable as-is.

If we'd even begin to appreciate how much FUD the "opaque" D/DMD licensing thing generates at large, we'd fix it for good, right now.

On Wed, 31 May 2006 02:55:32 +0300, Georg Wrede wrote:

> I wrote a draft for Walter a couple of weeks ago, so he'd put it on the DM website. PROMINENTLY. Until he does that, we'll just have to answer all these (IMHO valid) questions over and over again.

I can't find *any* licence on the DigitalMars D web site.

-- 
Derek
(skype: derek.j.parnell)
Melbourne, Australia
"Down with mediocracy!"
31/05/2006 12:36:14 PM

Well, you might think it is wrong - i certainly do not. dmd\license.txt and dmd\src\phobos\phoboslicense.txt files in DMD package tell everything people shold know, in plain english.

Dejan Lekic wrote:
> Well, you might think it is wrong - i certainly do not. dmd\license.txt and dmd\src\phobos\phoboslicense.txt files in DMD package tell everything people shold know, in plain english.

The problem is just that not everybody does find, download and unzip the DMD package, and then seek the files you mentioned. (I'm an old one here, but I'm not talking about myself, rather the thousands of new-to-D people who come and go.) A lot of people want to know the licensing issues up front, before wasting their time downloading stuff.

So, first, the license stuff has to be so prominent that folks see it before having to search for it.

And second, it has to be written "in plain language". (There can then of course be a pointer to the Real Legalese, or to those two files you mentioned, but the prominently visible text itself just has to be understandable right off the bat.)

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Dejan Lekic wrote:
> 
>> Well, you might think it is wrong - i certainly do not. dmd\license.txt and dmd\src\phobos\phoboslicense.txt files in DMD package tell everything people shold know, in plain english.
> 
> 
> The problem is just that not everybody does find, download and unzip the DMD package, and then seek the files you mentioned. (I'm an old one here, but I'm not talking about myself, rather the thousands of new-to-D people who come and go.) A lot of people want to know the licensing issues up front, before wasting their time downloading stuff.
> 
> So, first, the license stuff has to be so prominent that folks see it before having to search for it.
> 
> And second, it has to be written "in plain language". (There can then of course be a pointer to the Real Legalese, or to those two files you mentioned, but the prominently visible text itself just has to be understandable right off the bat.)


++ on that

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Dejan Lekic wrote:
>> Well, you might think it is wrong - i certainly do not. dmd\license.txt and dmd\src\phobos\phoboslicense.txt files in DMD package tell everything people shold know, in plain english.
> 
> The problem is just that not everybody does find, download and unzip the DMD package, and then seek the files you mentioned. (I'm an old one here, but I'm not talking about myself, rather the thousands of new-to-D people who come and go.) A lot of people want to know the licensing issues up front, before wasting their time downloading stuff.
> 
> So, first, the license stuff has to be so prominent that folks see it before having to search for it.
> 
> And second, it has to be written "in plain language". (There can then of course be a pointer to the Real Legalese, or to those two files you mentioned, but the prominently visible text itself just has to be understandable right off the bat.)

Yes - right by the download links something simply stating that DMD / Phobos can be used in any way the programmer sees fit to build applications and libraries, and DMD / Phobos themselves do not place any distribution restrictions on anything built with them. Then a pointer to where the license text is in the package should do it.