[LLVMdev] Offer of membership to LLVM into the Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.

[Chris Lattner]

On Sep 19, 2012, at 6:01 PM, John Criswell <criswell at illinois.edu> wrote:

> On 9/19/12 7:47 PM, John Criswell wrote:
>> [snip]
>> 
>>> 
>>> This, then, creates the issue that we have LLVM sub-projects that do not have the same license as the main project, which in turn means we can't free move code between the various sub-projects and the main project.  I know that the Address Sanitizer guys have had issues with this when developing their runtime library.
> 
> Sorry.  Missed reading this last part.
> 
> So the problem is being able to move code from the core compiler (which requires the license with binary distributions) to runtime libraries (for which binary license redistribution is a bad thing). Correct?
> 
> Hrm.  I am not a lawyer, but I don't think the MIT license gets you around the problem either.  Both require copies or significant portions to carry the copyright notice; link in enough of the library, and one may be technically required to include the license.

Hi John,

This is discussed here:
http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#copyright-license-and-patents

There are two different "advertising" clauses in the BSD license, depending on which version you're talking about.  The UIUC license has just the "binary" attribution clause, but that is still problematic for runtime libraries.

-Chris