Apple Originally Tried To Give GPL'ed LLVM To GCC

[storm_st]

In 12 months time you won't even touch GCC, with the state LLVM/Clang will have advanced.

12 months ? Ok, first time i read such promises was 8 years ago. I hope LLVM will catch current GCC quality in 8 next year time range (in 2014+8=2022), as it used by core Tungsten/Vmware Mesa, Gallium code and i hope for faster graphics, like not less then 90% of proprietary blobs.

[zanny]

That is what I mean by distributed copyright, all contributors retain the copyright to their contribution and provides access to their contribution through the license. As opposed to one entity having copyright to everything. Samba is also like that, and OpenWrt and KDE and many other successful open projects.

I know that as a software developer I won't contribute to projects with reassignment, or at least I'm not interested in doing so. Because I don't want someone relicensing my work because I gave them the right to to a license I don't agree with.

I imagine a lot of developers feel that way, so if you are going to contribute to something, you would favor the project that is community owned.

[Guest]

"Apple was trying to do the right thing" ummm so by Michael's logic, LLVM should have been integrated into GCC to be kept under the GPL license... What the actual f... ?! Are you serious?

There was nobody stopping Apple to license LLVM under the GPL if they wanted it, integrated into GCC or not.

Rising up shit storms is what passes for journalism these days.

It's not surprising since Michael is biased toward apple and llvm. At least, he should stop spreading false informations or just stop interpreting things on his own.

[mrugiero]

Oh, so Apple wanted to contribute to a GPL open source project without having an ulterior motive? Yeah, right. And Steve Jobs real name was Santa Claus.

Even if you think Apple are the devil, which they might perfectly be, they don't need an extra motive: having a free compiler means they have less costs in providing one for their products. Remember it was GPLv2 in that moment, so using it didn't mean problems for their business model. Making that compiler better, at the moment, could have been as well the end in itself.

Sure. I am no lawyer, but I do have colleagues that are which help me out on these issues. My understanding is that you need to have copyright in order to enforce the license, and this is invested in copyright law. In short, if you don't have copyright to the code, then no harm has been done to your property. Moreover, I believe it suffices to have copyright only to parts of the code, since those parts are also covered by the law, and is infringed. Hence, enforcing the license should be possible for anybody holding copyright to any of the code. It is important to note that GPL heavily relies on, and is ingeniously taking advantage of, copyright law.

I already knew that with no copyright you couldn't enforce (there is a simpler reason for this, you can't really know if the person "infringing" is actually infringing, as the copyright holder has the right to distribute under different licenses, so the person you think is infringing might as well just have the code under a different license with the authorization of the copyright holders), but my conception of the issue was that you needed ALL of the copyright to enforce, i.e., without copyright assignments you need all of the authors to agree in suing. But if it's the way you say, optional copyright reassignment should actually work better: you don't have to put all of your trust in a single entity (one that I'd trust, but that some other might not) to not relicense, but as long as someone takes this option, the FSF can still make sure the license is not infringed.

I know that as a software developer I won't contribute to projects with reassignment, or at least I'm not interested in doing so. Because I don't want someone relicensing my work because I gave them the right to to a license I don't agree with.

I imagine a lot of developers feel that way, so if you are going to contribute to something, you would favor the project that is community owned.

I think almost exactly like you, but I do an exception for the FSF because I trust they will not relicense into proprietary derivatives. As long as I trust they won't make use of this asymmetry in other way than enforcing the license, I'm OK with that. If they do something that makes me think they are selling sublicenses or anything like that, I'll change my mind and remove them from the (really short, as they are alone) white list of copyright reassignments.
I believe lots of developers have the same bias in favor of the FSF as I have.

[JX8p]

Oh, so Apple wanted to contribute to a GPL open source project without having an ulterior motive? Yeah, right. And Steve Jobs real name was Santa Claus.

Red Hat, Novell, Cygnus, basically just list ALL corporate contributors to FOSS. They have ulterior motives - they benefit from having their work upstreamed and not having to maintain it.

The community also benefits from having their work. This is one of the prime motivators of companies to release source code. That, and getting free programmers to work on their software.

[prodigy_]

Red Hat, Novell, Cygnus, basically just list ALL corporate contributors to FOSS.

While ALL corporations are evil, there's more than one shade of black. Please don't even try to compare Red Hat or Novell with Apple. The first is a clever geek lacking moral integrity. The second is a grumpy old man dreaming of the days of glory long since passed. And the third is a sadistic maniac ever on lookout for new victims.

[erendorn]

While ALL corporations are evil, there's more than one shade of black. Please don't even try to compare Red Hat or Novell with Apple. The first is a clever geek lacking moral integrity. The second is a grumpy old man dreaming of the days of glory long since passed. And the third is a sadistic maniac ever on lookout for new victims.

Because all corporations are single man/single team, and their purpose is always to screw the "community" first and foremost.

[dee.]

Because all corporations are single man

As legal entities, yes.

[Del_]

Because all corporations are single man/single team, and their purpose is always to screw the "community" first and foremost.

You can surely argue that this view has merit. However, I do not find it very useful. Moreover, it is an over simplification that can be quite damaging. In reality corporations are made up of individuals, where some individuals have wide ranging authority. In any larger company you will find individuals spanning a range of different attitudes towards open development (a somewhat narrow range in Red Hat I assume). For those of us who firmly believe in the open development model, participation in open projects can be just as sincere as participation from independent developers. There are a number of well-known examples, where maybe Chris Mason is one of the more noteworthy, making large parts of btrfs while at Oracle, a company not necessarily well-reputed within free software. Still, I believe Oracle did it for all the right reasons. What I am trying to say is, stereotypes don't really describe big companies well, unless it is Microsoft I guess, they seem to want war with everybody. In most cases big companies is a complex mixture of individuals with various influence on company policies.

[erendorn]

As legal entities, yes.

Completely true, completely irrelevant. Reminds me of jokes about mathematicians