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LLVM relicensing update and call for help

blog.llvm.org

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Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#31

Post by chrismsimpson »

ajkjk wrote: post #27

This kind of thing feels like such a waste of humanity's time. Is there an approach you can choose early in a project on that prevents ever getting in trouble later? I guess if I start some big library I will hope that everyone assigns the copyright for their contributions entirely to the project so that I never have to go through that nonsense. But I guess that has other ramifications.

Zero clause MIT or BSD or the Unlicense are seemingly the only licenses that protect from the tyranny of copyleft licenses.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#32

Post by Decabytes »

Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL.

Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser).

Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) that is Racket without the parenthesis.

They are playing the long game. But I hope these changes attract new Racketeers in the future

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#33

Post by josephcsible »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #31
ajkjk wrote: post #27

This kind of thing feels like such a waste of humanity's time. Is there an approach you can choose early in a project on that prevents ever getting in trouble later? I guess if I start some big library I will hope that everyone assigns the copyright for their contributions entirely to the project so that I never have to go through that nonsense. But I guess that has other ramifications.

Zero clause MIT or BSD or the Unlicense are seemingly the only licenses that protect from the tyranny of copyleft licenses.

Why do you call copyleft "tyranny"? If overnight, every single piece of open source software were somehow magically relicensed to AGPLv3 only, would there be any negative consequences at all for anyone besides people who wanted to write non-free software?

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#35

Post by rectang »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #31
ajkjk wrote: post #27

This kind of thing feels like such a waste of humanity's time. Is there an approach you can choose early in a project on that prevents ever getting in trouble later? I guess if I start some big library I will hope that everyone assigns the copyright for their contributions entirely to the project so that I never have to go through that nonsense. But I guess that has other ramifications.

Zero clause MIT or BSD or the Unlicense are seemingly the only licenses that protect from the tyranny of copyleft licenses.

The Unlicense is a "crayon" license i.e. not drafted rigorously. Choosing something like that dramatically raises the odds that you'll have to go through relicensing later.

I've been through this, having relicensed a project from the Artistic License Version 1 — another crayon license — to the Apache License Version 2.0. Fortunately we only had around 20 contributors, but it was still a huge pain. Don't do it to yourself.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#36

Post by still_grokking »

Decabytes wrote: post #32

Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL. Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser). Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) t…

> Developers are scared away by lGPL.

I see GPL as a sign of quality and am attracted by projects using it. It's a promise nobody will ever take that thing away from me once I've started using it.

I'm a developer, by the way. :-)

Edit: Not to mention that some people even using GCC, Linux and Java.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#37

Post by rectang »

Decabytes wrote: post #32

Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL. Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser). Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) t…

That's a different situation, because the LGPL is not a problematic license in terms of drafting.

With LLVM, the license isn't really changing in spirit. The concerns seem to be more practical — my understanding is that they're trying to get out from under a poorly drafted patent clause and also unify the code under a single license so they can move stuff around more easily.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#38

Post by dagmx »

still_grokking wrote: post #36
Decabytes wrote: post #32

Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL. Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser). Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) t…

> Developers are scared away by lGPL. I see GPL as a sign of quality and am attracted by projects using it. It's a promise nobody will ever take that thing away from me once I've started using it. I'm a developer, by the way. :-) Edit: Not to mention that some people even using GCC, Linux and Java.

Out of curiosity, how does the GPL promise that versus the other common open source licenses? E.g MIT, BSD or Apache?

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#40

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

shakna wrote: post #29
judge2020 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you grant a license that's sublicensable and exclusive (with all the extra legal rights granted), that's effectively transferring copyright since you can do everything you could as if you had transferred copyright.

However, in most jurisdictions where copyright is non-transferable, the original holder also permanently retains a right to cancel any such licensing agreement, at any time without cause. They cannot grant a license in perpetuity, and any language in the license to that effect has no legal weight whatsoever.

As far as I can find online, this is an edge case that's unlikely to ever be relevant.

Dutch law allows the voiding of licenses after "unreasonably long" terms. One suspects that it would be hard to show that a term is unreasonably long when you're talking about a contribution to open source software.

In Poland, there's a limit of five years, on the author's wish, with one year's notice. Fair enough, a Polish contributor might possibly demand that their code be taken out of a projects with a year's notice. It seems unlikely that many Polish devs will exercise this right, since, if their contributions are significant, it would probably result in blacklisting, and if not significant, it would probably not be worth it. But I suppose it could happen. If it happened often, Polish devs would likely stop being welcome to contribute to open source projects.

In Canada, there is automatic time-based reversion of rights 25 years after the author's death. So if you write code at 35, and die at 80, your estate could conceivably demand that your code could be removed from a project 70 years after you wrote it. Similarly, in the United States, you can revert your rights after going through some process and paying a fee after 35 years.

The probability of any of these things happening seems sufficiently remote that it doesn't seem worth worrying about. Technically these CLAs might not actually grant perpetual licenses, but in practice they're likely close enough.

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