On 20/09/2010 21:48, Don wrote:
retard wrote:
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:14:09 -0400, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:46:19 -0400, Bruno Medeiros
<brunodomedeiros+s...@com.gmail> wrote:
On 20/09/2010 16:13, klickverbot wrote:
On 9/20/10 5:10 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
I find myself wishing some more OSS projects had commercial-friendly
licenses. :-/ In particular LLVM, as I do agree it might have been
great
if Walter were able to work with it without these IP worries.
You want something even more liberal than BSD?
Oh, from this discussion, I thought LLVM was GPL or LGPL, but not BSD
(or more concretely, a variant of BSD from what I see).
What is the issue then of Walter taking a look at the LLVM code? It
does not seem to be the case that LLVM would send lawyers to anyone.
BSD includes a binary attribution clause (not sure about LLVM), which
makes it undesirable license for commercial use.
The issue is taint. I find this aspect of copyright and licensing
highly dubious (I can barely remember what I did last week, not to
mention some souce code I read last year), but the issue is this: Let's
say Walter does read LLVM source code, and then works on another
compiler project for another company that is completely proprietary.
LLVM has some possible connection to interject and say "you have to give
LLVM developers credit," even if Walter didn't copy any code. Yeah,
it's ridiculous and absurd, but possible.
So the another company goes bankrupt if Walter has to mention the name
'LLVM developers' in the documentation nobody reads and in an About
dialog nobody ever reads? I understand this when the other project
(LLVM in this case) has some viral license like GPL, but in this case
they only expect moral attribution. Your ideology is sick: "we must
steal as much as possible from the open source dickheads without
giving attribution, and turn the code into proprietary DRM shit to
enslave the world muhahaha"
I think there's no problem with using the liberal license in a compiler,
or in fact in any app. Walter deliberately errs on the paranoid side,
because of past court experiences he's had.
It's only in the standard library that the licensing can be a problem --
we don't want "hello world" to require binary attribution.
Ah, I see now. I was only thinking in terms of the compiler, where it
would not be a big deal if someone accused that the compiler used
BSD-licensed code.
But for the standard library, it would not be good at all.
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
