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I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand - you can't simply re-license the existing code, because the copyright does not belong to you. You could add your o

I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand - you can't simply re-license the existing code, because the copyright does not belong to you. You could add your own GPL-licensed improvements to the code though, in which case consumers would need to abide by the terms of the GPL (because they're consuming both the original BSD-licensed code and your GPL-licensed code).

zanny 12y ago
It is MIT based, which is GPL compatible, so yeah, you can make GPL only changes in your own Clang fork and if anyone uses your changes in their own Clang fork regardless of what all the other code is licensed under they are now beholden to the GPL. Which is why I really don't get the doom and gloom around GCC here. Architecturally LLVM makes huge sense. If you are a free software advocate it makes all the sense in the world as well to continue developing GCC until such a time where the technical merits of LLVM are too great to ignore. And then you just release GNULVM as a fork of LLVM under the GPL and continue on your merry way. Merge in all the good stuff from GCC and upstream patches from LLVM into your working tree and get the best of both worlds, because as long as new contributions are GPL you are not enabling the deprivation of user freedoms.
- eropple 12y ago
  > If you are a free software advocate it makes all the sense in the world as well to continue developing GCC until such a time where the technical merits of LLVM are too great to ignore. Unspoken is that there's not a ton of people ideologically devoted to RMSfree software these days. LLVM being usable by anyone is not sufficiently different for the current contributors and, I daresay, an overwhelming majority of folks who'd have a passing notion to work on such a project. One could choose to learn to be an effective LLVM developer, taking what that community will give, and then just not contribute back to the community in much the same way as the GNU folks sneer about proprietary code, but I think the intersection between people who are interested enough in LLVM to work on it and the people so objectionable as to try such a scheme is small. (But I am an optimist.)

zanny 12y ago

It is MIT based, which is GPL compatible, so yeah, you can make GPL only changes in your own Clang fork and if anyone uses your changes in their own Clang fork regardless of what all the other code is licensed under they are now beholden to the GPL. Which is why I really don't get the doom and gloom around GCC here. Architecturally LLVM makes huge sense. If you are a free software advocate it makes all the sense in the world as well to continue developing GCC until such a time where the technical merits of LLVM are too great to ignore. And then you just release GNULVM as a fork of LLVM under the GPL and continue on your merry way. Merge in all the good stuff from GCC and upstream patches from LLVM into your working tree and get the best of both worlds, because as long as new contributions are GPL you are not enabling the deprivation of user freedoms.

eropple 12y ago
> If you are a free software advocate it makes all the sense in the world as well to continue developing GCC until such a time where the technical merits of LLVM are too great to ignore. Unspoken is that there's not a ton of people ideologically devoted to RMSfree software these days. LLVM being usable by anyone is not sufficiently different for the current contributors and, I daresay, an overwhelming majority of folks who'd have a passing notion to work on such a project. One could choose to learn to be an effective LLVM developer, taking what that community will give, and then just not contribute back to the community in much the same way as the GNU folks sneer about proprietary code, but I think the intersection between people who are interested enough in LLVM to work on it and the people so objectionable as to try such a scheme is small. (But I am an optimist.)