Re: Merging gdc (Gnu D Compiler) into gcc

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

On 11/08/2010 11:13 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> 
> 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?

The FSF generally allows a grant-back: that is, you assign your code
to the FSF, which immediately grants you an unlimited licence to do
whatever you want with it.

Andrew.