Item — HN Reader

As someone who has had this conversation when trying to sell people on D a few times¹ it seems like an odd way to respond to it. When the licence text contained "the Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license, and may not be redistributed"² then it hardly meets the expectations people have of Open Source. This must end up in the weeds on source available vs Open Source more often than it shuts it down?

[And yes, I realise this comment is a perfect example of those weeds.]

¹ Although, I appreciate far less than either you, or especially WalterBright, have.

² https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6680

1 comments

> it seems like an odd way to respond to it

A better way to clarify it would be:

There are three D compilers available. Two of them have always been fully open source. Parts of one were originally source available rather than open source, but that one is now 100% open source as well. The website failed to communicate this information properly at the time the author first tried D.

The D website had, shall we say, uneven quality of communication back in the old days.

I've leaned on simply "yeah, but long since solved" when lunchtime chats were still a thing. It was the fastest way to shut down that branch in my experience.

However, I do like your full and complete answer. It acknowledges the old situation and completely nullifies it. I'll steal your second paragraph for when coffee time returns to normal ;)