Richard Stallman Calls LLVM A "Terrible Setback"

[Annabel]

That's exactly what our ancestors fought - communism and socialism, this is deeply anti-American, anti capitalist and anti free market, it has a "sharing" agenda and forces you to do so. Given that Stallman regularly visits China to give speeches I think he secretly works for the Chinese government.

Gud blez murica DDD

[curaga]

A week of two ago Bradley Kuhn spoke in the same vein. He predicted that five years from now, not only will LLVM be the reigning compiler, but it will have major proprietary plugins you need to buy for some functionality.

[frostwarrior]

This was clear in the message sent by ESR that he didn't care about freedom but about quality code.
The FSF cares about freedom, not about code and his confrontative spirit made them create a mandatory-open source license.

However, he was right when criticised the GCC decision of not accepting add ons. It should, and let the license protect it from private add-ons that don't respect the license.
This lincense predates privative work by itself, so you don't need to actually enforce it in the project choices. It should let third parties contribute code, and enforce the law when needed.

I'm not saying this because I'm pro RMS or anything like that. I just admit that RMS is a strong pillar of the free software movement and he's right about privative work predating the entire computing world. His stubborness makes him stand firmly, and let the "just open source" to exist happily in the middle.

[peppepz]

However, he was right when criticised the GCC decision of not accepting add ons. It should, and let the license protect it from private add-ons that don't respect the license.

He was wrong in the sense that GCC does accept add-ons and has done so for years now. He was told so in the list by GCC developers.

[Truth]

A week of two ago Bradley Kuhn spoke in the same vein. He predicted that five years from now, not only will LLVM be the reigning compiler, but it will have major proprietary plugins you need to buy for some functionality.

Typical GPL slavemaster rhetoric.

"Let us take away your freedom or the terrorists will win!!111"

The GPL truly is a crime against humanity, Stallman should be put on trial.

[Luke_Wolf]

When you build with LLVM, you have ASM bytecode output. An LLVM binary is universal with no ISA linking. Then at the runtime a JIT compiler final-forms the code for an ISA. The final form is not saved somewhere.

I know that LLVM has the capability to do that, but isn't that an option to compile to as opposed to being mandatory?

[Luke]

Paid plugins can and should be rejected

A week of two ago Bradley Kuhn spoke in the same vein. He predicted that five years from now, not only will LLVM be the reigning compiler, but it will have major proprietary plugins you need to buy for some functionality.

At which point those of us who are committed to refusing paid software will refuse to use those plugins. If GCC can do something free and LLVM requires money, that alone would be more than enough to keep GCC in existance. Both GCC and all-unpaid versions of LLVM exist now and cannot be recalled. Stallman is right: allowing our work to contribute to software for closed HARDWARE is a real menace. If closed branches/plugins feeding specialized hardware with documentation released only to the closed source devs under NDA takes off, we get a generation of hardware from which free or just non-monetized software is locked out. Fortunately this is like judo: for every move there is a countermove.

Lets put it this way: Suppose Nvidia wanted to charge people for their blob. Nvidia cards would hit parts piles and trash bins, and those with Nvidia laptops and not a lot of money would use Nouveau no matter the performance hit. Hell, I'd run straight vesafb before I would pay a dime for my laptop's video driver. Under those circumstances Nouveau development would accelerate, the blob would lose a hell of a lot of users, and few Linux users would buy discrete cards using Nvidia hardware.

Similarily, if there was a CPU, say an ARM CPU, that free compilers worked poorly with and for which you needed paid compiler plugins to get core functionality like power management to work, the result would be paid operating systems for that CPU getting a big advantage over free ones, or maybe an outright monopoly. You can buy something sort of like that today: An original (non-pro) Microsoft Surface tablet with Windows RT, complete with locked bootloader and OS locked to the MS store. There is NO way to replace the OS as of now, and it would take months of hacking to develop exploits just to allow sideloading unapproved software. Microsoft had huge numbers made-and few people bought them. As a result, most of that brand-new hardware will probably have to be scrapped.

[erendorn]

A week of two ago Bradley Kuhn spoke in the same vein. He predicted that five years from now, not only will LLVM be the reigning compiler, but it will have major proprietary plugins you need to buy for some functionality.

But then this will be functionality:
- not in the current LLVM,
- not in GCC 5 year from now.

So what's the problem? What will you have lost? "Lost" is for something that you had, and have not anymore. Not something you wish you could have had.

[moilami]

That's exactly what our ancestors fought - communism and socialism, this is deeply anti-American, anti capitalist and anti free market, it has a "sharing" agenda and forces you to do so. Given that Stallman regularly visits China to give speeches I think he secretly works for the Chinese government.

Ok........now it is time to take the little pills and go to bed! Tomorrow will be a new day

[Del_]

Basicially he is right that everybody could reuse llvm and create a non-free compiler or whatever based on it. But i see no huge impact for the community here as usually the number of users is often pretty small compared to the parts which have been open sourced. As long as the interesting improvements are open for the community it is still fine.

Well, we don't really know what goes on behind closed doors, Sony could have some really cool additions, Apple too. This is a very slippery slope where community efforts quickly dry out if community members feel left out.

If you only speak only about enforcing GPL to all users/companies of free software some most likely lost the interest even in using it.

This seems to be a very common misconception. You are most definitely wrong on this one. All companies around the globe worth a penny uses software available under the GPLv3 license. You are a very smart guy for whom I hold in high regards, hence I assume you simply did not imply the meaning as it stands. For a software company looking to use code in their own products it is of course very different, but from a users perspective, any version of GPL is not problematic at all.

The BSD licence is definitely more interesting for commericial use cases

You are very knowledgeable when it comes to software, but I am afraid you know little about law. The only software I can think of that has any value for the open community carrying a BSD license is ssh and ntp coming out of OpenBSD. I firmly believe that Theo's strong belief in a pure open source model (I would say he is one step further down that road than RMS actually) is the only reason they managed it. FreeBSD on the other hand doesn't seem to have any particular ideology. The only permissive license that makes sense for companies (that are not patent trolls, yes I am referring to Apple and Sony among others) is Apache 2.0, since it does have patent protection similar to GPLv3. With today’s litigation chaos you should come to realise that not having patent protection in your code is plain stupid. Of course the statistics show it:

http://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses

and yes I really need to say this strongly, because when even you haven't grasped the importance of this, many ideological believers in open development is bound to use BSD licenses without having a clue as to the dangers.

The most GPL violations found in the past was in router firmware. In many cases just busybox was used, that's a joke basically as more or less nobody changed that code anyway - mainly PR for gpl enforcemeant. I do not care for the right to enforce open source then the code gained is useless anyway.

GPL enforcement goes across a range of examples, the funniest was maybe Microsofts tool for migrating to windows 7, it was all opened up in the end as I recall. All my routers run OpenWrt, so your statement of worthless provokes me tremendously. More importantly though is not the violations, it is the software development it enabled. While little of value is available under BSD, and basically nothing of value to end users except the mentioned ntp and ssh, you will find that the top three desktops used by all BSDs are all copy-left (yes that typically means GPL). Moreover, almost all applications of value on all BSDs are also copy-left. Moreover, almost all of them have been developed on the copy-left project linux, a project younger than BSD. That is a hell of a lot of empirical evidence. You may choose to believe that all this software would have come about anyway under a permissive license if there was no GPL, but I do believe that you see that as highly unlikely.

To the contrary, the only participants in open source that seems to be truly successful are the ones that are crisp clear on their ideology. Red Hat and Debian are prime examples. Novell and soon Canonical are prime examples of what happens when you choose the more slippery slope.