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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

My only worry, in the light of Oracle's spat with Google over Dalvik and its lack of teeth over the OpenJDK, is what kind of patent protection the BSD-like license of LLVM offers against Apple in case it decides every Linux kernel on every non-iPhone smartphone (something that will probably happen in a couple years) infringes some patent they have that touches LLVM in some way.

Any lawyer wants to chime in?

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The GPL doesn't offer any special protection against third party patents, and there's no way it could, given the way patents work.

I am not considering 3rd party patents, but Apple's. If Apple includes some patented tech into a contribution to LLVM or Clang, what guarantees I have they will not sue non-Apple downstream users?

...in case it decides every Linux kernel on every non-iPhone smartphone...infringes some patent they have that touches LLVM in some way.

Is there some legal precedent you know of wherein compiler patents extend to the output of the compiler?

What if the output of the compiler uses some method you patented?

Then I suppose the community can fork from the revision prior to where that patented technique landed in the tree, just as with any other OSI-approved license.

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php

So, the license offers no protection at all...

Depends on one's perspective. Not long ago the meme de jour was that open-source transparency & fork-ability was the ultimate protection to corporate evils.

By the standard you're setting, the only safe compiler would be one you wrote yourself and revealed to no one. What compilers do you use?

Well, the technology used (the C language) is 30 years old. What is new is LLVM, but that was not created by Apple either.

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