[LLVMdev] Licensing requirements

[Chris Lattner]

On Jul 6, 2011, at 12:47 PM, Tor Gunnar Houeland wrote:

> On 07/06/2011 07:10 PM, Chris Lattner wrote:
>> On Jul 6, 2011, at 1:55 AM, Tor Gunnar Houeland wrote:
>> 
>>>> There is no need to include any notices in the binaries of an application built with clang, or some with some other application that links to the LLVM runtime libraries that are dual licensed.
>>> Thanks for your response. Is this ability to distribute binaries without notices based on your personal assertion that the MIT license used does not require them?
>> Yes.  I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice.  This is based on my understanding of the MIT license.
> 
> OK, thanks. That's contradictory to the actual conditions written in the license, and as such the dual-licensing does not serve that purpose. Could http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license be updated to reflect that?
> 
> (Or do you strongly disagree that "all copies of the software" includes "binary"? When changing the license, you mentioned an example of Mozilla building with Clang. As can be seen in about:license, they consider MIT licenses to require reproduction of the license text. What's your reasoning for your understanding?)

I, and many other reasonable people, consider the phrase:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

... to be talking about *copies of the software*.  A binary is not a copy of the software, it is a lump of bits derived from it.

I am not a lawyer, and do not offer this as legal advise.  However, lawyers that I respect agree with this interpretation.  You can choose to interpret it however you would like.

-Chris