Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 25, 2014 14:06 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by silvas
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

> As an LLVM developer, I'm pretty confident in saying that there isn't a single one of us who likes maintaining private branches...

Just have to point out the selection bias here. No, of course you don't like maintaining private branches, because you consider yourselves LLVM developers.

The people who _will_ be maintaining private branches won't consider themselves LLVM developers, just developers working on their proprietary projects (who probably don't talk about it much).

And since they wouldn't really care about the health of the wider LLVM project, strict "maintenance" of their branch would probably be a lot slacker ("do we care if we break obscure feature x? nah...").

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Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 25, 2014 14:14 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

But I think any developer - asked by his employer to maintain a private branch - is likely to kick back hard (if not that successfully).

Because one of two things is almost inevitable ... either

(1) the private fork will rapidly stagnate, or
(2) 90% of the developer's work will be make-work, trying to keep up with the Free version, for which the employer will be reluctant to pay.

In either scenario, I don't think the Free version has much to worry about. In scenario 1, the private branch won't be competitive. In scenario 2, the employer will have difficulty retaining staff.

Cheers,
Wol