Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 21, 2015 4:00 UTC (Wed) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Its niche as a static compiler is still incredibly important. We'll see how it goes, but it's not like GCC is standing still.

Ada is pretty much irrelevant but look at this shiny Rust frontend? Despite the fact that Ada is 27th on the TIOBE Index for October 2015 and Rust is 49th? The 2012 standard for Ada helped firm up Ada's niche, and while it's probably on the way out, well, we said that about C, too (#2 on the list). Whereas Rust is interesting, but it may be used, or it may fall into a pile of interesting languages that never hit critical mass.

In any case, besides counting races that have barely begun as being over, what does this have to do with licenses? Every time you say that LLVM is better at something, it makes it less likely that LLVM is being used by people for its license. The only way one example could even start to talk about licenses is if one product really sucked and yet was being used by a significant number of people because of its license; something that happens between open-source and proprietary code sometimes, but not really among open-source licenses.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 21, 2015 7:23 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Ada is pretty much irrelevant but look at this shiny Rust frontend? Despite the fact that Ada is 27th on the TIOBE Index for October 2015 and Rust is 49th?
Yup. Pretty much nobody uses Ada outside of tight circle of defense contractors. And TIOBE, seriously?

> In any case, besides counting races that have barely begun as being over, what does this have to do with licenses? Every time you say that LLVM is better at something, it makes it less likely that LLVM is being used by people for its license.
Yes, license is extremely important. For example, Mesa3D wouldn't have been able to use GCC even if they wanted to. Ditto for FTL JIT that Apple uses now.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Nov 1, 2015 1:33 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

Pretty much nobody uses Ada outside of a tight circle of defense contractors. True. And pretty much nobody uses Rust, period. If Rust isn't relevant, then it's not relevant.

Claiming that the license lets LLVM be used in spaces that GCC can't is a special-purpose claim; it's basically <i>why</i> LLVM and GCC can't be used as the end-all and be-all of how GPL is doing against less-restrictive licenses.