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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

#131

Post by reshlo »

Seirdy wrote: post #87
systemvoltage wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see GPL as a sign of quality Personal opinion is that BSD > GPL. Free as in properly free. I always donate to BSD license folks. When corporations use BSD software, they usually get engaged in the BSD community - under the stilts of management, suited lawyers and spreadsheet bean counters, it's just us programmer folk... you know. We like tinkering things and BSD software tends to have a different philosophy. Ver…

With few exceptions, I generally view the purpose of permissive licenses as "encouraging derivative software with EULAs and other restrictions", and the purpose of copyleft licenses as only allowing derivatives that don't restrict such freedoms. Copyleft software therefore guarantees more freedom than permissively licensed software.

The choice often isn’t between having a given derivative work be permissively licensed or copyleft. It’s between having the derivative work exist at all or not.

As a software author, choosing a license that requires people to be subject to more conditions to use my software is giving them less freedom, not more. If someone makes a derivative work with a restrictive license, that doesn’t make my software any less free.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#132

Post by respindola »

wyldfire wrote: post #39

Is Rafael de Espindola on that list? He seems to have left on not that great terms and I can imagine him not being interested in supporting a license change. He was a prolific contributor.

I guess I should be, but I don't see myself there. I haven't agreed to changing the license from the beginning:

https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-August/116370...

I have contributed to LLVM while working for INdT in Brazil, Google in Ireland and Canada, Mozilla and Sony Interactive Entertainment (both in Canada). I probably also got a few patches in between jobs.

Maybe they have tracked every patch to every employer and checked that the copyright is OK. Maybe they also rewrote the patches I did in between jobs, but I am not aware of any of that.

While my reason for leaving LLVM are indeed different from the license change, having to abandon what was a fairly successful career for refusing to accept racism does make it less likely that I will reconsider.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#133

Post by Xylakant »

jcelerier wrote: post #130
rocqua wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you ever used software linked against OpenSSL? It’s licensed under APL, which is very similar to the BSD family of license - it allows use in closed source projects. Or OpenSSH - it’s developed by the OpenBSD folks and licensed under a BSD style license. Or Firefox - licensed under MPL, very similar to APL. The rust compiler is dual-licensed under MIT/APL. Both ruby and python are dual-licensed with at least one license from the BSD/MIT group, the python license itself is similar to BSD as well. The Linux kernel allows incorporating BSD/MIT licensed code in the kernel itself and though I didn’t check, I’m certain there are examples.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#134

Post by est31 »

atq2119 wrote: post #112

FWIW, going with Apache 2.0 is/was a mistake. There is a clause in the license which implies that almost everybody who uses GitHub/GitLab/etc. to work on an Apache 2.0 project in the common workflows is in breech of the license. Specifically, the license says that every file with modifications has to include a corresponding notice that the file was changed. Nobody does this in practice. Unfortunately the license is s…

Yeah it's horrible how Apache 2.0 has become an industry standard with this clause in place. I think this industry standard status was the main reason why LLVM has chosen it.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#135

Post by orf »

What happens if one of the contributors has died?

I think it’s highly unlikely you’re going to get agreements from even the majority of the long tail, so moving towards the “end-game” before 2023 might be prudent.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#136

Post by kzrdude »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #110
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…

The number of people who refuse to commit to MIT/BSD/etc. code is almost not existing, the number of people who refuse or cannot commit to GPL is plentiful. > It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL I agree, there are still too many people who think the GPL is _just_ another license. It's not and many figured this out the hard way after they…

Moving away from any particular license is hard to impossible.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#137

Post by kzrdude »

Vinnl wrote: post #113
still_grokking wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People can't simply take away MIT-licensed code either - it grants you the right to use that code, and does so irrevocably. What GPL does is make sure that code that is built on top of that will also be accessible to you, if the product it's used in is made public. But your own contributions and anything MIT-licensed it is added to will never be legally taken away from you.

With software, we don't see any frozen particular version as the main asset, but the continuity of the project is the asset. Otherwise we wouldn't de-value unmainted software so much. (The code is there, the license is clear, it could be used).

GPL makes sure the project's main strand of development stays accessible to you.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#138

Post by fn-mote »

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.

> I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.

Sure, but how is this verifiable? Not verifiable = not happening.

Anyway, the idea of using a 20 line function in a 20M line codebase is a total strawman. Think of it from the 20 line function author's point of view - free money for corporate? They lack the expertise internally to write this function?? It's crypto code and getting it 100% right is extremely valuable? Then they need to be licensing it from the author.

It sounds like the idea you have here is that someone has licensed their code under the GPL but "didn't really mean it"? I think you should flesh out that side of your argument... why should corporate be permitted to use this code? Authors who are worried can release their stuff as MIT or CC0.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#139

Post by fn-mote »

reshlo wrote: post #131
Seirdy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With few exceptions, I generally view the purpose of permissive licenses as "encouraging derivative software with EULAs and other restrictions", and the purpose of copyleft licenses as only allowing derivatives that don't restrict such freedoms. Copyleft software therefore guarantees more freedom than permissively licensed software.

The choice often isn’t between having a given derivative work be permissively licensed or copyleft. It’s between having the derivative work exist at all or not. As a software author, choosing a license that requires people to be subject to more conditions to use my software is giving them less freedom, not more. If someone makes a derivative work with a restrictive license, that doesn’t make my software any less free…

> that doesn’t make my software any less free

You might say it makes your software less yours, though.

A restrictive license protects your interest in the code. After all, that's why companies are releasing their code under restrictive licenses.

100% agree there's a tradeoff of this with popularity, and it will never matter for almost everyone. But the people for whom it does matter get upset sometimes --- licensing is a choice that needs to be made with eyes wide open.

Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help

#140

Post by andybak »

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…

> lGPL

I was googling "I" GPL. Maybe consider upper-casing the L next time so it's not as ambiguous?

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