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Can someone explain how the current licence is a problem for the following: * Encourage ongoing contributions to LLVM by preserving a low barrier to entry for

Can someone explain how the current licence is a problem for the following: * Encourage ongoing contributions to LLVM by preserving a low barrier to entry for contributors. * Protect users of LLVM code by providing explicit patent protection in the license. * Protect contributors to the LLVM project by explicitly scoping their patent contributions with this license. * Eliminate the schism between runtime libraries and the rest of the compiler that makes it difficult to move code between them. * Ensure that LLVM runtime libraries may be used by other open source and proprietary compilers. Is it because the other license is relatively unknown? Can anyone shed light on why they didn't opt to go for BSD or MIT license? (is it the patent protection stuff?)

geofft 8y ago
The first mailing list post is a pretty good dive: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536.html http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536... In particular, the Apache license is a very clear and more importantly very well-accepted mechanism of licensing relevant patents and not irrelevant ones. The BSD and MIT licenses may or may not license patents depending on how you (or the courts, really) interpret "Permission to use ... is hereby granted ...." They also had a custom scheme for dual-licensing the runtime libraries that get linked into compiled binaries. The new scheme grants a non-attribution license based on the fact that it ended up in your code after running clang, not which repo it was in, which makes it easier for LLVM to refactor code between repos.