Apple has a history with gcc.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 19:52 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146)
In reply to: Apple has a history with gcc. by pbonzini
Parent article: Emacs and LLDB

he certainly understands that LLVM is a threat to copyleft (as you pointed out, GCC, together with Linux, is probably the most successful copylefted program) and as such to the GNU project's vision of software freedom.

The GNU project and the GPL were a reaction to academics and software company conspiring to make software closed that previously was developed openly and accessible to its users in academia and elsewhere.

The GPL and GNU were the weapon designed to work against making software proprietary, with the vision to regain a world where software was free.

Now LLVM is free, not due to the GPL though arguably due to the example and pressure the GNU project put on the market. So I have a hard time seeing it as a threat to the GNU projects's vision of software freedom. It isn't even much of a threat to copyleft: should Apple or somebody else do a heinous move on the central part of LLVM, it is likely that a workable community could be formed around a GPLed fork of LLVM.

So if someone wanted to seriously thwart LLVM serving a vision of software freedom, the GPL could become part of saving the day.

So in a somewhat amusing way, GNU and the GPL actually make sure that LLVM stays free, and they would even do that if GCC did not factor in the equation at all.

So unless some GPL-incompatible licensing change happens with the bulk of the LLVM community in support of that change, LLVM is not much of a stepping stone towards ending the free software dream. It just is not a weapon against proprietary compiler versions either. Which GCC is.

Apple has a history with gcc.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 20:35 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Now LLVM is free, not due to the GPL though arguably due to the example and pressure the GNU project put on the market. So I have a hard time seeing it as a threat to the GNU projects's vision of software freedom. It isn't even much of a threat to copyleft: should Apple or somebody else do a heinous move on the central part of LLVM, it is likely that a workable community could be formed around a GPLed fork of LLVM.

If, in order to utilize $specific_feature, you are forced to use a proprietary fork of LLVM, it doesn't matter how open/free the "central" part is, or how open or rapidly said central part is developed/improved. You are completely at the mercy of whomever provided that proprietary fork.

Look at Android if you want to see another example of how little anyone actually gives back to the "open/free" central core, and how you're generally forced to rely on proprietary forks if you want to utilize the vast majority of the devices on the market.