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

For years LLVM has been working on a massive relicensing of its code-base but that effort is still ongoing as they are still trying to track down some past contributors to collect their sign-offs on the change.

LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base. As a reminder, they are working to move from the University of Illinois / NCSA Open-Source Library (similar to the MIT/X11 and 3-clause BSD) and over to Apache 2.0 license with an LLVM Exception. The "LLVM Exception" to Apache 2.0 is for code compiled by LLVM to not impose the same redistribution conditions and when pairing LLVM code with GPLv2 code the user can opt for the indemnity provision.

The LLVM Foundation has managed to get approval for more than 94% of the older code to be relicensed but are trying to get to nearly 100% so they can legally relicense it to Apache 2.0.

This Google spreadsheet shows the remaining individuals and organizations they are trying to get approval from still but have been unsuccessful in their communications thus far.

The hope with the license change is to clear up the patent section of their former license that led to some confusion and organizations not contributing, getting the run-time libraries and the rest of the code under the same unified license, and clearing up wording on the patent rights.

More details as to the current state of the LLVM relicensing effort can be found via LLVM.org.