On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 15:49:41 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On 28/10/13 14:22, evilrat wrote:
sure, but i would prefer LLVM license over GCC if i were in
Apple dev team(and
that what they did). also LLVM is quite young, so who knows
what people
contribute to it in near future...
Surely, but we should have sympathy for Apple's desire to be
able to exert proprietary control over their products because
... ? :-)
Do you have any evidence that they've exerted "proprietary
control" over llvm, say by adding closed modules to their
compiler?
I actually talked to the head llvm guy at Apple about this
possibility a couple years back and he was adamantly against
anyone outside closing up parts of the compiler. Of course, he
may not get to make that decision at Apple and we can't know the
truth unless we peek at the source for the shipping compiler at
Apple, but I haven't seen any evidence that llvm isn't developed
in the open.
Have you?
Don't get me wrong, LLVM itself is a fantastic project, and as
long as people contribute great code to great free software
projects I don't really mind what their motivation is, but if
Apple's goal is to avoid the patent-related provisions of
GPLv3, we could be in for a nasty surprise at some point in the
future if compiler-related patents Apple holds become part of
the battleground of the computing market.
While I do not buy Apple products because of their odious patent
stance, I highly doubt they would ever use such compiler patents,
if they even have any. Microsoft has a patent on continually
scanning a document for spelling errors and highlighting them
(http://www.google.com/patents/US5787451), yet _as far as we
know_ (and according to a former Microsoft employee -
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=1548), they've never
asserted it on the dozens of applications with such
spell-checking in their text editing controls, including this
Chrome browser tab I'm currently typing into.
I agree that it is a problem that Apple doesn't do a patent grant
for their open source projects, assuming they even have any
compiler or other software patents on them, but I'm skeptical
they'd ever enforce those anyway. Also, IANAL, but I believe
they'd never be able to extract any money from such a lawsuit
anyway, since they don't make any money from clang or Safari and
give them away for free.
From a purely technical point of view, Apple doesn't need a
compiler that supports a wide range of platforms, so GCC's much
broader range of hardware support is irrelevant to it. But
it's an advantage GCC continues to have in the bigger picture.
Sure.
