On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 06:19:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 2/18/2016 1:30 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> It's not a strawman. Walter has state previously that he's explicitly avoided
>> looking at the source code for other compilers like gcc, because he doesn't want
>> anyone to be able to accuse him of stealing code, copyright infringement, etc.
>> Now, that's obviously much more of a risk with gcc than llvm given their
>> respective licenses, but it is a position that Walter has taken when the issue
>> has come up, and it's not something that I'm making up.
>>
>> Now, if Walter were willing to give up on the dmd backend entirely, then
>> presumably, that wouldn't be a problem anymore regardless of license issues, but
>> he still has dmc, which uses the same backend, so I very much doubt that that's
>> going to happen.
>
> It's still an issue I worry about. I've been (falsely) accused of stealing code in the past, even once accused of having stolen the old Datalight C compiler from some BYU students. Once a game company stole Empire, and then had the astonishing nerve to sic their lawyers on me accusing me of stealing it from them! (Showing them my registered copyright of the source code that predated their claim by 10 years was entertaining.)
>
> More recently this came up in the Tango/Phobos rift, as some of the long term members here will recall.
>
> So it is not an issue to be taken too lightly. I have the scars to prove it :-/
>
> One thing I adore about github is it provides a legal audit trail of where the code came from. While that proves nothing about whether contributions are stolen or not, it provides a date stamp (like my registered copyright did), and if stolen code does make its way into the code base, it can be precisely excised. Github takes a great load off my mind.
>
> There are other reasons to have dmd's back end. One obvious one is we wouldn't have had a Win64 port without it. And anytime we wish to experiment with something new in code generation, it's a heluva lot easier to do that with dmd than with the monumental code bases of gcc and llvm.
>
> One thing that has changed a lot in my attitudes is I no longer worry about people stealing my code. If someone can make good use of my stuff, have at it. Boost license FTW!
>
> I wish LLVM would switch to the Boost license, in particular removing this clause:
>
> "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
>
> Reading it adversely means if I write a simple utility and include a few lines from LLVM, I have to include that license in the binary and a means to print it out. If I include a bit of code from several places, each with their own version of that license, there's just a bunch of crap to deal with to be in compliance.

Please don't get me wrong, we all apreciate what you offered to the D community, but all these legal arguments are strongly tied to you, and less so to the community.

Your LLVM license nit pick is hilarious, you can't do that when the "oficial" D compiler has a non-liberal licensed backend, you just can't. Speaking of which, I think realistically DMD's backend will generally have ~ 1 major contributor, I think you guessed who that is.

But setting things aside, we all need to acknowledge that the current setup is not fair to motivated and proven third party compilers, their contributors, and their users.

The D ecosistem must create and foster a friendly environment to anyone wanting to have a good compiler that is current with the language/runtime/phobos developments.

I'm not seeing you, or Andrei, exploring and encouraging this actively, what I see is a defensive approach on DMD's merits.

On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 22:19 -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
> 
> One thing I adore about github is it provides a legal audit trail of
> where the
> code came from. While that proves nothing about whether contributions
> are stolen
> or not, it provides a date stamp (like my registered copyright did),
> and if
> stolen code does make its way into the code base, it can be precisely
> excised.
> Github takes a great load off my mind.
[…]

Has there been case law in the USA that gives a Git log official status as a record of history? I haven't done a detailed search here, but I am not aware of any case law in the UK on this. Other jursidictions will have their own rules obviously.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 16:51 +0000, David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> Travis CI, which is probably the one "trendy, hipster" service
> most would think of, has been supporting D for quite some while
> now due to Martin Nowak's great work. (He put Iain's name and
> mine on it too, but we didn't really contribute at all.)

Indeed Travis-CI advertises it's D capability. Apologies for implying it didn't.

Other cloud CI services are definitely lacking though, at least in
their advertising of supported langauges.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 2/26/2016 2:41 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Has there been case law in the USA that gives a Git log official status
> as a record of history? I haven't done a detailed search here, but I am
> not aware of any case law in the UK on this. Other jursidictions will
> have their own rules obviously.

I'm not aware of any, either, that is specific to github. But given how digital records in general (such as email, social media posts, etc.) are routinely accepted as evidence, I'd be very surprised if github wasn't.

On 2/26/2016 1:47 AM, Radu wrote:
> Please don't get me wrong, we all apreciate what you offered to the D community,
> but all these legal arguments are strongly tied to you, and less so to the
> community.

Didn't Google get hung out to dry over 6 lines of Java code or something like that? And I don't know how long you've been around here, but we DID have precisely these sorts of problems during the Phobos/Tango rift. Ignoring licensing issues can have ugly consequences.


> Your LLVM license nit pick is hilarious, you can't do that when the "oficial" D
> compiler has a non-liberal licensed backend, you just can't.

That's not under my control, and is one of the reasons why D gravitated towards the Boost license for everything we could.


> But setting things aside, we all need to acknowledge that the current setup is
> not fair to motivated and proven third party compilers, their contributors, and
> their users.

I don't see anything unfair. gdc, ldc, and dmd are each as good as their respective teams make them.


> The D ecosistem must create and foster a friendly environment to anyone wanting
> to have a good compiler that is current with the language/runtime/phobos
> developments.

And that's what we do. It's why we have 3 major compilers.

On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 02:52 -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> I'm not aware of any, either, that is specific to github. But given
> how digital
> records in general (such as email, social media posts, etc.) are
> routinely
> accepted as evidence, I'd be very surprised if github wasn't.

Be careful about make assumptions of admissibility as evidence. I have been expert witness in three cases regarding email logs and it is not always so simple to have them treated as a matter of record. Of course the USA is not the UK, rules and history are different in every jurisdiction – and the USA has more than one!

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 10:41:31 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Thu, 2016-02-25 at 22:19 -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
> […]
>> 
>> One thing I adore about github is it provides a legal audit trail of
>> where the
>> code came from. While that proves nothing about whether contributions
>> are stolen
>> or not, it provides a date stamp (like my registered copyright did),
>> and if
>> stolen code does make its way into the code base, it can be precisely
>> excised.
>> Github takes a great load off my mind.
> […]
>
> Has there been case law in the USA that gives a Git log official status as a record of history? I haven't done a detailed search here, but I am not aware of any case law in the UK on this. Other jursidictions will have their own rules obviously.

BTW Malicious people can cheat and commit in the past, according to

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

commitment date is not reliable.

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 06:19:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I wish LLVM would switch to the Boost license, in particular removing this clause:
>
> "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
>
> Reading it adversely means if I write a simple utility and include a few lines from LLVM, I have to include that license in the binary and a means to print it out. If I include a bit of code from several places, each with their own version of that license, there's just a bunch of crap to deal with to be in compliance.

Hi Walter,

I recall there was a thread in the LLVM mailing list last year about moving to a different license. So maybe that is on the cards, and the D community could chip on that conversation.

I feel that by moving an LLVM backend D will gain the help / expertise of a large number of companies that are working on LLVM including Microsoft & Google. Isn't Clang's claim that it is much faster than gcc when it comes to compiling? So maybe the speed of compilation using LLVM is not such an issue as presumably a lot of the cost in C++ compilation is in the front-end and with D the same issues won't arise?

In any case with scarce resources it seems wasteful to have people working on multiple backends - it would make more sense to converge to one backend - and LLVM being non-GPL and having a lot of momentum may be the best option.

I also feel that a lot of the C++ interfacing could be done by using the Clang libraries - again for similar reasons that you will gain from work already being done.

Regards
Dibyendu

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 11:35:04 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 06:19:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> [...]
>
> I recall there was a thread in the LLVM mailing list last year about moving to a different license. So maybe that is on the cards, and the D community could chip on that conversation.
>

I am referring to this thread:

http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536.html

On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 11:12 +0000, BBasile via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> BTW Malicious people can cheat and commit in the past, according
> to
> 
> https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
> 
> commitment date is not reliable.

Indeed, which is why Mercurial is a much better system, though it is far from perfect.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder