Microsoft Releases Source For Its GDB/LLDB Debug Engine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Releases Source For Its GDB/LLDB Debug Engine

Sliding under the radar last week was Microsoft releasing the source code to its debug engine for the GNU GDB and LLVM's LLDB Debugger...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Open-GDB-LLDB

[Adonai]

LLDB is open but it's not free, hence the backing of corporations is clear. It can be embraced, extended and extinguished at any time.

[justmy2cents]

LLDB is open but it's not free, hence the backing of corporations is clear. It can be embraced, extended and extinguished at any time.

"The debug engine uses the GDB Machine Interface (MI) to communicate with GDB and LLDB. We continue to make contributions back to the LLDB project to add functionality to the LLDB MI layer so it functions on parity with the GDB MI layer." https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/o...tml#GDB_002fMI

[uid313]

Thanks Microsoft!

[duby229]

Isn't this kind of like selling your soul to satan for a single one time klondike bar? Yeah, sure you get a klondike bar, but you could bought it yourself and kept your soul!

[paulpach]

Isn't this kind of like selling your soul to satan for a single one time klondike bar? Yeah, sure you get a klondike bar, but you could bought it yourself and kept your soul!

This is MIT licensed. LLDB devs can both take this code and keep their soul.

[eydee]

Isn't this kind of like selling your soul to satan for a single one time klondike bar? Yeah, sure you get a klondike bar, but you could bought it yourself and kept your soul!

Well, linux users are well known for selling their souls for an evil company called nvidia, so there's nothing new except for the different name.

[Scheiker]

"Many organizations have been putting their weight behind LLDB given that the code-base is much more modern and cleaner than GDB and GCC, the more liberal license, etc" I facepalm everytime I see a license like MIT get described as more liberal or more free than the GPL. The FSF believes that the purpose of a software license is to grant additional freedoms that the copyrighted software otherwise wouldn't have. Thus copyrighted software without a license doesn't give you any freedom at all. The only difference between a MIT license and a GPL license is that the GPL license grants additional freedoms that the MIT license doesn't have. For instance, GPLv3+ adds freedom from being restricted by hardware that doesn't allow you to modify the program, a process known as tivoization. This doesn't mean that the GPLv2 and MIT licenses are non-free license, because when they aren't being tivoized, they are just as free as GPLv3 software likewise. However because MIT and GPLv2 doesn't have this freedom, someone could add this restriction by making the software tivoized, and thus making it non-free software as the FSF defines it here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . Some people will try to say that the GPL is restricting you from adding restrictions, which is doubletalk. "It doesn't give me the freedom to take away freedom.", doublespeak. This flawed logic would have you believe that countries with freedom of speech laws are somehow less free than ones that don't. The only reason you would favour a BSD or MIT like license over a GPL one is because you believe that freedom should be taken away. It explains why companies hate copy-left. It explains why more BSD software is distributed as proprietary software rather than freesoftware. Calling LLDB more liberal is just propaganda for those that don't want you to have freedom.

[Daktyl198]

...

There's a very big difference between GPL's "Freedoms" (some of which are laughable), and the generally accepted definition of the word liberal (in a non-political sense).
The very fact that GPL forces you into "freedoms" makes it less liberal than probably 90% of other licenses. Hell, I bet you could find proprietary licenses that restrict you less than the GPL.

[dragorth]

The GPL licenses add freedoms for the end user by limiting what the developers can do with the code. The MIT and BSDs are focused on the freedoms of the developers. The difference is the intended audience of the code. Since the MIT and BSD is intend for developers it sees more adoption from developers.