LLVM Still Proceeding With Their Code Relicensing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LLVM Still Proceeding With Their Code Relicensing

It's been three years since the original draft proposal for relicensing the LLVM compiler code was sent out and while there hasn't been a lot to report on recently about the effort, they are making progress and proceeding...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Code-Relisencing-2018

[tildearrow]

Typo in article URL:

Relisencing

[Duve]

Michael, GPLv23?

[caligula]

Funny how people thought only GPL2/3 involves drama. If you ask the corporations, WTFPL/MIT/PD is the best license.

[reavertm]

Funny how people thought only GPL2/3 involves drama. If you ask the corporations, WTFPL/MIT/PD is the best license.

For the corporations surely. For the software or for end users? Debatable.

[wizard69]

For the corporations surely. For the software or for end users? Debatable.

Does it really matter for most end users?

It it is interesting that in this article you have people quoted as saying in one case the new license is a good thing and in the same case another saying it is a bad thing. So one person is pro change and another not! Both can’t be right.

[Vistaus]

Michael, GPLv23?

Wow, they sure went hella fast from v3 to v23! GPL is the new Google Chrome!

[Vistaus]

For the corporations surely. For the software or for end users? Debatable.

I've never heard of WTFPL or PD, but what's wrong with MIT for end users?

[duby229]

I've never heard of WTFPL or PD, but what's wrong with MIT for end users?

Software using it protects the copywrite holder not the end user or even the developers in some cases. Those licenses were designed such that software using them can be affectively proprietary. It's great for corporations that want proprietary software but don't want to develop it, but then the development burden ends up entirely on the open source devs, ala freebsd as an example or llvm as another example. They both have ton's of proprietary forks that will -never- have their modifications upstreamed.

On the other hand AMD uses it because they need their open source drivers to work on many different OSes which have incompatible licenses. But secretly I think the real reason is because they have proprietary forks of it....

[phoenix_rizzen]

BSD-style licenses work great for libraries and infrastructure code, where you want it to get into as many projects as possible, whether OSS or proprietary. The more people that use it, the better.

Copyleft-style licenses work better for end-user applications, where you want to keep the applications themselves open (source, use, and otherwise). It's too bad these are used for libraries and infrastructure code as well, which leads to a lot of duplication of effort as people write non-copyleft versions of the libraries.