LLVM Is Still Working On Relicensing, Needs Help Locating Some Past Contributors

[jabl]

Its not just about purism, its a massive PITA when legal is involved. Working at a company that is open source first, its a LOT easier when projects use well established licenses rather than coming up with their own because the legal precedent is already known for commonly used licenses.

Yes, like I said, if you're starting a new open source project there is extremely little to be gained and lots to lose by inventing a new license rather than by going with a widely used existing one.

However, the examples that ui313 are all licenses that have been stamped as OSD-conforming licenses and are relatively well known. There is, arguably, were little upside in switching an existing project with lots of different contributors from one of them to the even more widely used MIT or 1/2/3-clause BSD licenses as the terms and conditions, even the language, is very similar with only very small differences.

Not sure why you are specifically mentioning GPL here, this problem would have been avoided if they used any well established license (not just GPL). I suspect this is mainly a case of university having license vanity and wanting to come up with their own license to feel special.

The NCSA license that LLVM previously used wasn't some particularly exotic one (e.g. you can find it both in the OSD license list and in the GPL-compatible license list the FSF maintains), in practice it is equivalent to MIT or 3-clause BSD. The reason LLVM wanted to change was that they ("they", as in LLVM contributors including big companies with lots of lawyers) wanted the extra patent language that Apache-2.0 has; for most software this is probably irrelevant, but compiler optimization algorithms are unfortunately something of a patent minefield.

[caligula]

Serious question if anyone knows the answer. What happens in the case where the original author of some code has since passed away? I have thought about this before and do not know the answer. But I am curious.

That would make you extremely lucky. Only 95 more years till the (c) will expire.

[CommunityMember]

At least two people on the list should not be hard to find

The issue is that (depending on the individuals employment contracts) the current company, and the employees previous company, and the previous previous company, may either hold the copyright(s), or may hold the copyright(s) along with the individual (so the individual cannot, themselves, reassign). Anyone who has had to deal with a large corporations legal team knows that getting approval for anything (especially IP transfer) can require acts of deity (and likely triply so if you no longer are employed by the company, as no one will likely be authorized to take your calls regarding IP).

[ArchLinux]

I wish that PHP would move off the PHP License, and that PostgreSQL would move away from the PostgreSQL License, and that Python move away from the Python Software Foundation License, and that Ruby would move away from the Ruby License.
That they would all adopt a popular open source license, such as MIT License, 2-clause BSD License, or Apache License 2.0.

Why you keep saying, why you keep saying "License".

Like we don't know these are licenses.