LLVM Clang 14 Lands An "Amazing" Performance Optimization

[oiaohm]

I am sorry but unless you are a lawyer your opinion is worth the amount of thought you made to write this post

The Qt license setup was a rare case that you got a legal presentation from their legal team with the differences between commercial and GPL/LGPL licensed products. Basically I have had lawyer that don't match up to your experiences.

1. How much lawyers time you want to waste and how many complications are created
2. How much the decision opens you up to legal and hence monetary risk. The thing that most companies want to avoid at all costs is going into a lengthy legal battle.

RCU, Qt and many more cases. Parties like IBM with RCU and the different companies that have owned Qt and many others they want to sell commercial license to those that don't want to share the source code and save in development labor cost due to sharing the source code.

You have missed a monetary risk. Apache does not leave you in a location to sell a license extra license. So there is a monetary risk choosing those licenses because they don't give you a stick to that could encourage a party to pay your for a different license on the same source code(like GPL does) or for a patent(like MIT does)..

People forgot things like Fluendo codecs yes they were licensed under MIT license yet you were expected to pay a patent license to use them. Then the Qt and RCU cases where the companies behind them using GPL and LGPL are expecting to be able to sell you a license to use the same stuff without having to release the source code public.


What I wrote mdedetrich "Most of the choice comes down to how company is planning on profit." is true.

1) Is true most of the time because wasting lots of legal time is not a profit making move in most cases. Planning to make a profit you will limit legal costs right.
2) Legal risk is considered. This does not always stop companies getting into lengthy legal battles like google vs oracle over java. But this is again planing not to make a lose. why did orcale push this case.
3) Income stream. Now income might be money might be free developer time. Oracle attacking google is explained by number 3. Google undermined oracle income stream of java.

Profitable business for majority of what they do will have a profit model. Is sales of final products, is this selling support. is this selling patents, is this selling special licenses to get around a particular licenses restrictions... and many more.

mdedetrich I guess most of the cases you have been dealing with is selling complete devices to users and that is your profit/income stream.

The parties choosing GPL/LGPL mostly own to two camps
1) they are selling licenses to get around GPL/LGPL to parties that don't want to follow GPL/LGPL. (this has included oracle and ibm)
2) they are wanting more developers working on the code and release their changes back than they want to spend money on.(cost reduction to them long term by forcing license compliance)

GPL ecosystem is a particular subsets and those subsets are doing it for different profit making plans.

MIT and Apache groups also have there own subset of companies. Like not all MIT licensing companies are going in with the plan we will be demanding patent license from everyone who uses their MIT licensed code but there is a subset of those who license code under MIT license that there plan is truly demand patent license from anyone who uses it.

mdedetrich each subset is made up of "numerous companies" some companies are different subsets depending on what department you are in as well.

Think about this mdedetrich you have a particular skill set. You are likely to be employed by companies of the same subset of profit making plans. Being in the same subset of profit making plans the legal teams are going to be responding all the same way because that is correct for the profit making plan of the business and the plans were the same. Observer bias problem.

Please note mdedetrich I am not saying what you have seen is false but there is a Observer bias you have not considered. This observer bias means you should expect in most cases to go though most of your work history seeing a single profit making model. Please note this Observer bias is not unique in acting they call it type casting.

This is nasty bias thing.

[coder]

Sure as a one off you can be right, but as I said before what I am saying has been consistent over numerous companies in the career I have worked at, and these are copyright/IP lawyers.

I know. I just couldn't resist sharing that anecdote. I was utterly dumbfounded, when I heard what he'd decided.

[mdedetrich]

Even then, it really depends on the quality of the lawyer. At one time, the IP lawyer in my company told us we couldn't use LGPL-licensed libraries, in our closed-source commercial product. I told him he'd better take another look, and he eventually came around to my point of view.

Granted, his main area was patents, rather than copyright. Still, such a blatant error can really cause a substantial loss in confidence.

Sure as a one off you can be right, but as I said before what I am saying has been consistent over numerous companies in the career I have worked at, and these are copyright/IP lawyers.

[coder]

I am sorry but unless you are a lawyer your opinion is worth the amount of thought you made to write this post

Even then, it really depends on the quality of the lawyer. At one time, the IP lawyer in my company told us we couldn't use LGPL-licensed libraries, in our closed-source commercial product. I told him he'd better take another look, and he eventually came around to my point of view.

Granted, his main area was patents, rather than copyright. Still, such a blatant error can really cause a substantial loss in confidence.

[mdedetrich]

https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/ MIT and like license have their issues. Why the preference can be important mdedetrich.

Legal department can have a MIT license preference because they want to be licensing out companies patents on anyone who uses the source code.

Apache is like because as long as correct attribution is given internal work of company may not have to be released.

There are cases where different companies have chosen LGPL or GPL intentionally lot of cases like Qt with dual license setups.

I am sorry but unless you are a lawyer your opinion is worth the amount of thought you made to write this post

Most of the choice comes down to how company is planning on profit..

Wrong. Most of the choice comes down to these things

1. How much lawyers time you want to waste and how many complications are created
2. How much the decision opens you up to legal and hence monetary risk. The thing that most companies want to avoid at all costs is going into a lengthy legal battle.

[oiaohm]

legally speaking every lawyer/legal department I have encountered in my career given the preference, would use Apache/MIT. If you are already in contributing to a GPL ecosystem than that is a different story, but you didn't have much choice to begin with.

https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/ MIT and like license have their issues. Why the preference can be important mdedetrich.

Legal department can have a MIT license preference because they want to be licensing out companies patents on anyone who uses the source code.

Apache is like because as long as correct attribution is given internal work of company may not have to be released.

There are cases where different companies have chosen LGPL or GPL intentionally lot of cases like Qt with dual license setups.

Most of the choice comes down to how company is planning on profit..

[mdedetrich]

Interesting, that hasn't really been my experience or for other people contributing to open source on company time I've read about.

Same, I work on at an open source company where we have a process that lets you open source software and Apache 2 is our recommended license. GPL is only used when you are forced to do so (I.e. we recently open sourced a project that uses eBPF eith it's symbols)

legally speaking every lawyer/legal department I have encountered in my career given the preference, would use Apache/MIT. If you are already in contributing to a GPL ecosystem than that is a different story, but you didn't have much choice to begin with.

[mdedetrich]

What do you mean by "worse"? Legally? Financially? Choice wise not enough software?

Legally

[oiaohm]

Yeah, you can think of it as limiting the freedom of immediate downstream contributors for the benefit of all those downstream of them. It's trading local restrictions for more freedom, globally.

However, I think it's silly to moralize about open source licenses. They each have their benefits and drawbacks, and which appears best depends entirely on where you sit and what your goals are.

Moralize model does make sense to work out why different choices are being made. If the downstream parties are not moral and will take open source work and proceeded to closed source it, monetise it and finally directly compete with the open source work so effect running it out of market a non copyleft license is not a good move. Yes companies willing todo the bad behavour generally is like disobey the basic old rule as well "Don't kill the goose that lays the gold egg" Yes the upstream open source project is normally the one laying the golden egg.

One way copyleft is limiting freedom but in some areas of the market that limit freedom is very much like a general world laws of do not kill the project you are taking advantage of.

If everyone in this world was 100% moral we would not need to punish people for murder. The reality is the world is morally imperfect.

Lot of people who want to push the moral as the reason to use X license in the process forget we are living in a moral imperfect world. Depending on how morally imperfect the people you are dealing and your own moral standards with serous-ally alters your license choice.

[mdedetrich]

What do you mean by "worse"? Legally? Financially? Choice wise not enough software?

It was very unpopular at the time, back then (at least in America) proprietary software was seen as the go to, red hat was the exception that pushed things forward that the industry needed.