Open Definition 2.0

Posted Oct 8, 2014 22:50 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: Open Definition 2.0 by landley
Parent article: Open Definition 2.0

> (Fork examples: xfree86->x.org, gcc->egcs. More current rewrite example: gcc->llvm, because enough people responded to GPLv3 with "hell no" to sustain quite an active project.)

The push for LLVM has much less to do with GPLv3 (at least, directly), and much more to do with two factors: Apple pushing hard to get away from *any* GPL code (v2 *or* v3), and GCC not being usable for plugins/libraries/embeddable things. Now, you can most certainly blame the latter on the FSF, for being so concerned about proprietary GCC extensions that they pushed back hard against providing any kind of stable internals for GCC. But that has little to do with GPLv3.

I think it's rather unfortunate that the latter momentum combined with Apple's fear of copyleft drove people to an all-permissive project, and I think we're going to regret that in the future. There's a very real tendency for people doing a rewrite of a project for unrelated reasons to also switch to an all-permissive license to use it in proprietary projects, because it gets them a quick boost in momentum.