The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's) [LWN.net]

The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)

Posted Jun 2, 2012 13:57 UTC (Sat) by sgros (subscriber, #36440)
Parent article: The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)

Isn't one of the reasons for success of LLVM also its license? I admit I have read only a part of the quoted article, but it doesn't mention license anywhere. Honestly, I think that less "restrictive" license (compared to GPL) helped a lot (primarily to involve Apple, but *BSD community too).

(Log in to post comments)

The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)

Posted Jun 4, 2012 1:00 UTC (Mon) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

The permissive license certainly has got a few corporate players in the mix and that's a good thing. I don't know that it has resulted in a lot of innovation or major transformation/codegen work that wouldn't have happened anyway. Certainly various organizations are holding things back and keeping then proprietary. It's really had to guess the "what ifs."

Certainly Apple would not have worked on a GPL project and this would not have hired Chris Lattner. So while it's interesting to speculate, it's impossible to know where Chris would have landed or what would have happened in the alternate universe.