Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 15, 2010 7:24 UTC (Thu) by jdv (guest, #712)
Parent article: Dispatches from the compiler front

I just see a plugin trying to piggy-back on the hard work of GCC front-end developers and negating the efforts of those working on the middle ends and back ends.

What's wrong with piggy-backing on the work of others? It's free software. One of the reasons software is free is so that others can change it and build on it without hassles -- in other words, piggy-backing on the hard work put into the original.

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 15, 2010 15:36 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (7 responses)

Some notable companies are jumping on LLVM explicitly to avoid the GNU GPL. Apple's move to emphasize LLVM pulled developers off of gcc and echoed problems from long ago. So some people see an LLVM plug-in as *exactly* the reason why plug-ins were banned for so long.

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 15, 2010 18:31 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (4 responses)

Is the LLVM license GPL-compatible?

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 15, 2010 18:33 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

(particularly, could you grab the code and re-license it under the GPL)

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 15, 2010 18:51 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Interesting reading from the SFLC on the topic: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl...

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 27, 2010 17:27 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Obviously no. You can't grab code belonging to somebody else and slap your own license on it. What you can do is to include some code into a larger work under another license if the licenses are compatible (i.e., some BSD code into a GPLed whole).

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 16, 2010 8:13 UTC (Fri) by baldrick (subscriber, #4123) [Link]

LLVM uses the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is GPL compatible.

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 16, 2010 4:44 UTC (Fri) by magnus (subscriber, #34778) [Link] (1 responses)

It will be interesting to see if LLVM can hold together as one project and support as many arch:s as GCC or if it will splinter into proprietary forks.

Without the GPL enforcing it, I think many CPU manufacturers would have made their own (possibly binary only) GCC forks instead of contributing back.

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:10 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

There a many variations of GCC that have not been contributed back. The code is available for others to pull in, sure, but (a) the community doesn't care about the forks and so has no desire to maintain them and (b) those forks are hairy and gross and otherwise not something you're likely to want in the first place.

It's much the same story as the Linux kernel. Being GPL only guarantees that some kind of non-binary and arguable human-readable code representation of a modification exists. It does not guarantee that those code representations are actually worth crap to anyone in the larger community.

The argument also fails to note MANY examples of BSD and MIT licensed software that has thriving involvement from the proprietary sectors.

Until the GPL states, "all modifications must be accepted by and committed into the original authors' tree before released as part of a product, unless he explicitly states he does not want the modifications due to lack of interest in the nature of the modifications made (and not solely due to correctable implementation flaws)" the GPL is really quite ineffective at enforcing any kind of community involvement or useful code contributions on the part of a company. It's really no harder to be a poor sport with the GPL than it is with the BSD license.

Dispatches from the compiler front

Posted Apr 22, 2010 10:57 UTC (Thu) by steven97 (guest, #2702) [Link]

There is nothing wrong per-se with piggy-backing. What is wrong here, is the hypocrisy of it all. On the one hand certain LLVM developers leave no opportunity unused to trash-talk GCC, and try to lure developers away from GCC on GCC mailing lists. On the other hand those same developers have no problem taking the GCC front ends and expect the GCC community to cooperate. It's IMVHO just opportunism of the worst kind.