Mold 1.7 Released But May Need To Change Software License If Funding Not Secured

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mold 1.7 Released But May Need To Change Software License If Funding Not Secured

Mold is the modern, high performance, and open-source linker taking on the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.7 has been released as the newest update to this very promising linker, but unfortunately the lead developer is evaluating a license change. Due to still losing money over working on it full-time, he may be forced to change the software license without obtaining sustainable funding...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-1.7

[tildearrow]

It's even a bit ironic that I had been asked by several big-name companies when mold/macOS would become available, since they wanted to use it for their multi-billion-dollar businesses.

If those companies have billions, why couldn't they spend some money on adding macOS support, and therefore contributing?

[mirmirmir]

Hippity hoppity, my software would be proprietary

[karolherbst]

Full support from my end.

If those companies have billions, why couldn't they spend some money on adding macOS support, and therefore contributing?

You'd be surprised how much of an issue that is in most corporations. And in the end "there is no budget" because execs need to be paid big money.

[ms178]

I'd say: Go for it, with silver/gold/platinum tiers to differentiate for levels of developer access/feature requests/timely bug fixes etc. These corporations need to learn that enhanced productivity doesn't come for free, even if the software itself is open source.

[archkde]

If those companies have billions, why couldn't they spend some money on adding macOS support, and therefore contributing?

They apparently don't want to. And that's the whole point of the problem. As somebody who has actually contributed a tiny bit of code to mold to be able to link one garbage hobby project, I find this really sad.

[MauganRa]

As for the Mold 1.7 release, this linker has now added support for the Motorola 68000 "m68k" processor architecture. Mold 1.7 also fixes issues when using Facebook's LLVM BOLT optimizer and other fixes.

It sounds like he again included too much in this still-free release. Both items sound like they cater mostly to corporate usage.

[ms178]

It sounds like he again included too much in this still-free release. Both items sound like they cater mostly to corporate usage.

I guess he was in talks with some corps that wanted that feature in Mold but did not pay him anything for actually impelementing these features.

Differentiation in features between a paid and free version doesn't make sense, I think. From a technical standpoint it is easier to maintain a single code base with the least amount of different code paths and there is also no need for this as the valuable part for companies is the access to the developer and his willingness to implement certain features or bug fixes in a specific time frame. From a legal perspective, even if there is a free version for consumers, corporations would need a paid license, and they better pay for that license if they do not want to be exposed to litigation (and corporations are very sensitive to this).

[nanonyme]

Hippity hoppity, my software would be proprietary

Ridiculous idea indeed. The software does not become retroactively proprietary. Anyone who has code available before relicensing has privilege to fork with AGPL.

[ayumu]

Reality check: Nobody is using Mold. Most haven't even heard about it.

If it became proprietary (as if AGPL wasn't bad enough), it would simply and completely disappear from sight.

Any key good ideas it might have are visible in the already out there AGPL code. If any corpo cared about these, they'd literally reimplement them (possibly as BSD/MIT code, possibly as proprietary code) in the toolchains they use, rather than pay for a license.

That's just how it is today.