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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

#121

Post by pjmlp »

seabird wrote: post #108
pjmlp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without GPL, people wouldn't be enjoying their Linux distribution, but naturally this is a moot point given how the BSD distributions have taken over the UNIX world.

Commenting on BSDs losing out to Linux seems like a weird dig in this context, considering that a large contributing factor to that was legal threats from AT&T.

Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#123

Post by ksec »

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…

>Racket had to do this to go from "lGPL"

Is that a typo of LGPL or does lGPL means something else? I even had to google it to make sure it was a "L" and not an "I".

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#124

Post by rini17 »

snovv_crash wrote: post #78
tarsinge wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that corporations prefer something they can profit from without giving back vs something they can not is circular reasoning to me. Conversely if you look on the other side you'll see developers bitten by permissive software licences (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, ...).

"without giving back" is a bit of an exaggeration. You could have a giant 20M line proprietary codebase, and if you incorporate a 20-line function from a GPL source, GPL says you need to relicense the whole thing. I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.

So you would be actually fine with GPL if excerpts up to 1000 lines were not covered by copyleft?

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#125

Post by ksec »

pjmlp wrote: post #121
seabird wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenting on BSDs losing out to Linux seems like a weird dig in this context, considering that a large contributing factor to that was legal threats from AT&T.

Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.

>while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.

The dust was settled then, Google and all were on linux. Compared to BSD era. Not to mention the legal threats were not in the same order of magnitude.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#126

Post by aardvark179 »

sam_bishop wrote: post #44

It was a good idea to post this to HN. Back when I was an LLVM contributor I was using an email address from a provider who is no longer around. I had no idea that the LLVM maintainers were trying to get a hold of me. There's probably a lot of overlap between LLVM contributors and HN readers.

Yeah. I see one person I know and have forwarded the blog post to them.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#127

Post by reshlo »

yeahforsureman wrote: post #116
snovv_crash wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"without giving back" is a bit of an exaggeration. You could have a giant 20M line proprietary codebase, and if you incorporate a 20-line function from a GPL source, GPL says you need to relicense the whole thing. I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.

Or lacking adequate case law, that's what the FSF et al. would want you to believe, anyhow. Although a bit vaguely drafted in this respect, the copyleft effect of GPL depends on the concept of a derivative work under copyright law. It would be a bit far-fetched to claim that in your example, the combination of the function and the codebase is a derivative of the function you incorporated. Anyway, because the fact tha…

I don’t think it matters whether the GPL can successfully be enforced against the example you describe. The license’s author intended that it could be, and that is what matters.

A philosophical disagreement with the license’s intent shouldn’t be overlooked just because the license might not actually be enforceable.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#128

Post by chalst »

kergonath wrote: post #104
rocqua wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's OS is a fork of BSD without the fork being open source.

It’s more complicated than that. It was not a fork, they just copied some parts of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The kernel is XNU, and descended from Mach. Also, Darwin (the base OS, which includes the BSD bits) is open source. What isn’t is the GUI on top of it, which comes from OPENSTEP.

The open source part of Darwin/XNU doesn't deserve to be called a "base OS" since version 6, when Apple closed the sources of a lot of drivers. There's no hardware that will boot these systems if you restrict to what is available under the APSL.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091118172944/http://www.pureda...

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#129

Post by ksec »

I knew LLVM was doing a relicensing for a long time. And it was great that MAMAA all had lawyers agreeing on Apache 2.0 with Exceptions. ( Which in itself is probably a multi million operation ).

I keep wondering they they did not make Apache 3.0 with all their problems solved. And instead becomes Apache 2.0 with Exceptions?

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#130

Post by jcelerier »

rocqua wrote: post #93
Smithalicious wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers are scared away by lGPL. For me it's very much the opposite, I refuse to contribute code to anything licensed under the MIT/BSD/etc family of languages. It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL that it's scaring people off. I think that most of these people would feel differently if they understood better. I think the systematic…

I don't think people who shy away from GPL are in favor of the free software movement. People who advocate for MIT like licenses like 'open source', but they usually explicitly reject the ideas from free software. Some of these concerns are simply commercial, and some are philosophical. I think people might have been convinced to dislike GPL. But I don't think that was misinformation or confusion. It might be fear-mo…

I have yet to see BSD / MIT meaningfully improving my personal life, quite unlike the GPL which pretty much made my career possible thanks to the wealth of GPL software under Linux
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