[LLVMdev] GPL licensing issues or can GCC be used with llvm for a commercial application?

[Chris Lattner]

On May 13, 2008, at 10:04 PM, Razvan Aciu wrote:
> Thanks for your replies. This is indeed a helpful mailing list. I  
> made some
> more researches about the licensing issue and this is what I  
> discovered:

> For now, I think for a commercial developer who wants to create a  
> complete
> compiler toolchain using llvm, trying to package its compiler with  
> GCC is a
> very dangerous decision.

Hi Razvan,

I don't want to discourage you, but you are basically asking for  
interpretation of legal documents.  This is a very tricky area, and  
taking advise from random people on the internet is not a great idea  
(extension of the "on the internet noone knows you're a dog" theory).   
If you really really need to know the answer to questions like these,  
the best bet is to hire legal council.

If you just want a reasonably sure bet, you can look to the lead of  
others.  In the US, there are many organizations comfortable with  
integrating LLVM and GCC and using GNU tools in the toolchain of  
proprietary compilers.  If your situation is similar to those, you may  
be satisfied that you won't have a problem.

> If I am myself in that situation I should not do
> it, but instead I should try to use a non-GPL assembler and linker.  
> So, from
> my point of view, the necessity of an I86 native target who address a
> BSD-like licensed assembler, strongly remains.

As I mentioned before, I would support people who wanted to extend the  
scope of this project to include new toolchain pieces.  All that we're  
missing is for someone to actually do the work :).

-Chris