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

[Hal Finkel]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:04:02 -0700
Owen Anderson <resistor at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 19, 2012, at 3:56 PM, dag at cray.com wrote:
> 
> > Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> writes:
> >> We are not interested in copyright enforcement at all.  In personal
> >> discussions with Bradley, he mentioned that they may be able to
> >> help us move the codebase to the MIT license, which would clarify
> >> that issue as well as resolve the current issues around runtime
> >> libraries.
> > 
> > Thanks for clarifying, this is helpful.  What's the motivation for
> > moving to the MIT license?  Something more than general familiarity?
> > 
> > What's the issue with runtime libraries?
> 
> I Am Not A Lawyer, etc….
> 
> My understanding is that the issue is about the "advertising" clause
> in the UIUC license, similar to old-style BSD licenses.  It generally
> isn't much of a problem to reproduce the copyright header in the
> documentation for a compiler that is based on LLVM.  However, it's
> not an appropriate clause for a runtime library that will be linked
> into applications compiled *by* LLVM.  We don't want to force our
> users to have an LLVM copyright header included with their binaries
> just because we linked them against compiler-rt.  That is why
> compiler-rt is dual licensed with the MIT license today.

I am supportive of a licensing change. The MIT license contains the
"substantial portions" qualifier, which seems fairly ambiguous, and
does not specify whether 'copies ... of the software' includes
binaries, etc. I think that the Boost license is better in this
regard.

 -Hal

> 
> 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.
> 
> --Owen
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Postdoctoral Appointee
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory