[llvm-dev] RFC: Improving license & patent issues in the LLVM community

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

On 20 Oct 2015, at 17:55, Daniel Berlin <dannyb at google.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 9:53 AM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 20 Oct 2015, at 17:46, Daniel Berlin via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > You could ship the non-combined program.
> > IE  You can ship an llvm jit and a gpl2 program, and jit the program
> > on the user's machine.
> 
> NeXT believed that shipping the GPL-incompatible bit as a shared library that was linked on the end user’s system was enough.  
> 
> This is fairly different, but it delves very far into the grey area of what a derivative work is, and is likely not worth getting into on the mailing list.
> What i suggested above is in fact, specifically foreseen and allowed by the GPL, AFAIK, and requires no tricky legal thinking.

I’m not sure about v3, but v2 only permits this if the LLVM JIT is in a separate process (which is also why GDB speaks a simple text process).  One of the unfortunate problems with v2, which was not fully addressed in v3, is that it makes a lot of assumptions about the linkage model of C code on a UNIX-like system and so becomes very difficult to interpret when people try to use it for other languages.

David