OpenBSD Founder Calling For LLVM To Face A Cataclysm Over Its Re-Licensing

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 28 September 2016 at 08:02 PM EDT. 51 Comments
LLVM
For over one year there's been talk of LLVM pursuing a mass relicensing from its University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license, to the Apache 2.0 license with explicit mention of GPLv2 compatibility. As mentioned in that aforelinked article, this re-licensing is moving ahead. OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt is predicting this could cause a major problem and is in fact hoping for it.

LLVM/Clang has been popular with many BSD operating systems due to the LLVM/Clang's more liberal licensing. But if they switch to the Apache 2.0 license, Theo de Raadt commented, "I hope a year or two later, some author of a component
(especially one from Europe where the moral rights of an author still carries substantial weight) submarines the new licence, surfacing to indicate that they never signed off on the additional terms applied to them as a significant author, and will accept no cash to solve the problem. Then they are dead in the water."

If that comes about, then he feels the project could face a cataclysm and that a fork of LLVM/Clang could happen from the last point of the code being under the current license.

Theo goes as far as causing the current re-licensing push "copyright theft" and "I suspect a few people are being paid a lot of wages to act as agents permitting theft from their co-contributors. They worked with others but now they are ready to steal from them." He's also hoping that someone now will intentionally try to get "a major diff" of code into LLVM now and will ultimately oppose to this re-licensing being pursued by the LLVM Foundation.

You can read his interesting remarks via this mailing list comment.
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