I specifically said I was loathe to make any such thing.
Which usually (IME) implies that you think you might
be...
You sir, are reading far too much into this
:)
No, I was trying to figure out exactly what to read
into it. Thanks for the additional comments. (I'm one of those people who
learn by making provocative statements or questions and then seeing what sort of
response I get.)
However, as you seem determined to do so, one
might make the further observation that development of GCC from its inception
was funded by donations of developers own time, plus some funding from private
sources solicited by rms. LLVM, otoh, with its permissive license only got off
the ground after massive government subsidy of preliminary work at University of
Illinois.
Do you have a cite for "massive?" It is my
understanding that both GCC and LLVM were started by, essentially, university
researchers, who are expected to do the sorts of things that might result in
such a thing as a compiler.
Which must in no way be interpreted as
implying that the sole reason for LLVM's belated entry on the open source
compiler scene was corporate fear of such permissive license.
I
think we all agree that a lot of corporations love free code from elsewhere,
especially with a permissive license. (A non-permissive license is often not a
deal-killer, but is one more variable that needs to be taken into account before
committing resources to use third-party code.)
There are obviously a lot of
people here who think that permissive licenses allow for more mischief than
copyleft licenses, but I am glad they are both in the ecosystem. If someone
would feel abused by a third party taking their code and making proprietary
changes to it and making a ton of money, then by all means that programmer
should choose the GPL. If someone would otherwise prefer a permissive license,
but is merely worried about patent abuse, the Apache license might be a
reasonable choice.
Apple (despite my other serious misgivings about them) is
exceptionally smart about this, in that they recognize that good developers are
often motivated by other things than money, and often hire world-class
developers by offering them things they want (like the opportunity to keep
contributing to open source).
Indeed, given LLVM's academic
provenance, such BSD-style licensing is undoubtedly the most appropriate choice.
I personally welcome both LLVM and Apple's furtherance of the
project.
I agree on all counts, though I am aware that many, if
not most, others here greatly prefer copyleft licensing.
As a
further irrelevancy, Apple -- to no apparent detriment -- is the current owner
and maintainer of CUPS.
Right. Apple needs to control its own
destiny, so for something like CUPS, it is happy to let the developer keep
providing it under the GPL, but Apple itself is not bound by the GPL as owner.
For something permissive like LLVM, Apple has every incentive to hire some of
the good developers, but no real reason to own the project outright.
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