LLVM 2.7 released

Posted Jul 14, 2010 23:37 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: LLVM 2.7 released by trasz
Parent article: LLVM 2.7 released

the problem with the BSD version is that once you are employed by the company, future updates tend not to go to the BSD licensed version, but instead to the version your company creates under a proprietary license.

Also, the other people who sent you patches, but did NOT get hired may get upset with you and stop sending you patches.

the end result is that the BSD version may start off strong and may become a cornerstone for some proprietary product and the free version languishes and eventually replaced by another project,while the GPL version keeps growing until the company says "we're using this a lot and want to have in-house expertise, we'll hire one of the (many) developers to work for us so that we can get their attention"

How many BSD kernel developers are being paid to work on BSD code vs how many Linux developers are being paid to work on GPL code?

LLVM 2.7 released

Posted Jul 15, 2010 14:32 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (2 responses)

If the company doesn't want to release the code under BSD, they probably wouldn't release updates under GPL either - they just wouldn't use that code.

As for your "languishing" scenario - nice theory, but experience shows it just doesn't happen; the BSD projects keep going, from FreeBSD (countless commercial derivatives, from Juniper to these weird Silicon Graphics boxes serving storage to the Linux clusters), to PostgreSQL, to Xorg (MIT is pretty much 2-clause BSD).

As for the numbers - how many MySQL developers are being paid to work on GPL code vs how many PostgreSQL developers are being paid to work on BSD code? Comparing Linux and FreeBSD is not really representative, because Linux is way more popular - it's almost like comparing <insert some GPL windowing system> and Xorg.

LLVM 2.7 released

Posted Jul 16, 2010 5:55 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

if the *BSD projects didn't languash in favor of the proprietary forks Linux probably would not exist today as one of the BSDs would be in it's place.

I think the situation of them vs Linux is a _perfect_ example.

LLVM 2.7 released

Posted Jul 16, 2010 10:52 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

So you're claiming that JunOS forced FreeBSD out of core routers, NetApp forced FreeBSD out of high-end NAS, and Apple forced FreeBSD out of desktops and mobile phones. You are aware that this doesn't really match reality, aren't you? ;->

Actually, proprietary forks of FreeBSD didn't replace the vanilla version anywhere. Thus, it's not a good example, just like GPL windowing systems vs BSD windowing systems wouldn't be.