Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which provider? What was their domain name?
Just Ctrl+F their name in the spreadsheet.
Where in that page is a spreadsheet? Maybe I’m just not seeing it on mobile device.
LLVM relicensing update and call for help
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not being able to relicense code provided by other people without their agreement is definitely a feature of any license. Let’s not kid ourself: the main reason companies don’t like the GPL is because they don’t want to share the code they actually use in their products. Making that impossible is an intended consequence of the license not some unforeseen flaw. If you are fine with companies profiteering from your wor…
The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that. Given the murky laws around copyright reassignment getting contributions in under a more liberal license so you retain extra rights yourself is tricky. There are many projects which learned after a few years that their ch…
> The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that.
If you accept contributions, that’s not your work anymore. That’s your work and your contributors work. You are still perfectly free of removing said work and commercialise your own. You just can’t profite from the work of others without asking them. That’s a feature of the license not a risk.
> Given the murky laws around copyright reassignment getting contributions in under a more liberal license so you retain extra rights yourself is tricky.
You are misrepresenting the situation once again. It is not about retaining your own right. The whole issue is on the work of others.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ev…
Thanks for your contributions, Rafael. Do you ever regret your decision? I think I understand your perspective, but does it ever seem a bit impractical to move away over the CoC? It seems like Renato had similar misgivings but resolved to stay, for example. I can understand not wanting to agree to the CoC but what about continuing to contribute without agreeing? Also, the association with "outreachy" seems to have li…
The CoC I think I could live with, if it would stop there. The LLVM foundation supporting outreachy that was too much for me. It would indeed have little or no impact on me, since I was already an established developer, but I know that would not have been the case if I was starting now (I wrote a bit about it in https://quillette.com/2018/06/26/diversity-and-discriminatio...).
More importantly, Niemöller's poem always comes to mind when the argument is "it has little impact on you". So no, I don't regret it.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, unless the copyright holder of that code decide to use another licence in the future — then the snapshot that was licensed as GPL will remain available to you, but the main strand of development may not.
But yes, if this copyright is spread over many people (as it is in this case), then re-licensing is a herculean effort that is especially unlikely to succeed if it's designed to take away user rights, so in that sense a GPL'd project is more likely to remain open.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#165MAMEdev hit this problem a few years back as well. Thankfully, the end result of code that needed to be ripped out and rewritten ended up being pretty small comparative to the whole project. A lot of that came down to there being no corporate interests involved, so no corp VS author arguments-- the worst ones to deal with were contributors who were adamant about keeping the original non-commercial license on their co…
Did they? That's interesting. No one ever contacted me about my contributions and whether I'd like to relicense them or not. I also noticed someone went through a long time ago and scrubbed a lot of names out of the source code entirely. Which is nice.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there are many reasons for Linux 'winning', and it's not easy to attribute weights to each one. GPL is probably one, Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.
> Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.
Not to mention being easier to try out (the path to becoming a developer starts with trying it out). Back when Linux was growing, it was very easy to install, to the point of not even needing to repartition the disk; through the magic of UMSDOS and LOADLIN, you could install it to your DOS partition and treat it as if it were a DOS program (with the only difference being that you couldn't "exit" Linux back to DOS without rebooting). From what I've heard, not only was that not possible with the BSD distributions, but also they were more picky about the hardware. That was the path I took: when I wanted a true Unix-like (instead of just playing with DJGPP), I did some research, and concluded Slackware was the best option, mainly because it had UMSDOS and so if it didn't work out, I would just have to remove its directory (of course, once I noticed I wasn't even using DOS anymore, I dedicated a full partition formatted as ext2 to Linux, and later started installing Linux exclusively).
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that. Given the murky laws around copyright reassignment getting contributions in under a more liberal license so you retain extra rights yourself is tricky. There are many projects which learned after a few years that their ch…
> The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that. If you accept contributions, that’s not your work anymore. That’s your work and your contributors work. You are still perfectly free of removing said work and commercialise your own. You just can’t profite from the work…
Something does not stop being my work when it hat contributions from others but generally that’s besides the point. The main issue of GPL comes from the risk to the original creator itself. Others not using the software is less the concern.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are many reasons for Linux 'winning', and it's not easy to attribute weights to each one. GPL is probably one, Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.
> Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one. Not to mention being easier to try out (the path to becoming a developer starts with trying it out). Back when Linux was growing, it was very easy to install, to the point of not even needing to repartition the disk; through the magic of UMSDOS and LOADLIN, you could install it to your DOS partition and treat it…
Walnut Creek CD-ROMs also provided a way, including live CDs.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#169My personal issue with the LLVM re-licensing and its exception clause is that it made no effort to deal with a few projects which had used the LLVM core in an LGPLV2.1 context, only those projects in a GPLV2 context.
This screwed over a few projects which are unable to re-license to an apache2-compatible license. Offhand, I believe it affected the LGPLV2.1 licensed Wine/Codeweavers win32 emulation layer for running windows 32-bit programs on a 64-bit-only mac, and affected several other programs as well.
Re: LLVM relicensing update and call for help
#170Earlier 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
It's debatable that most GNU stuff would be available if it were not for BSD.