This page is missing one crucial piece of information: what's the current license?
It's (a BSD-like) University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License:
It's (a BSD-like) University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License:
Sure, apache 2 has the patent stuff, but I fail to see how anyone would object to it.
OpenBSD is objecting to it like so[1]:
> [...] In particular, if you use code under the Apache 2 license, some of your rights will terminate if you claim in court that the code violates a patent.
> A license can only be considered fully permissive if it allows use by anyone for all the future without giving up any of their rights. If there are conditions that might terminate any rights in the future, or if you have to give up a right that you would otherwise have, even if exercising that right could reasonably be regarded as morally objectionable, the code is not free.
> In addition, the clause about the patent license is problematic because a patent license cannot be granted under Copyright law, but only under contract law, which drags the whole license into the domain of contract law. But while Copyright law is somewhat standardized by international agreements, contract law differs wildly among jurisdictions. So what the license means in different jurisdictions may vary and is hard to predict.
FWIW, this is really the only strong objection we've heard to the overall direction of this change.
.. You might think that objection would be listened to more readily, or do the interest of a handful of corporations hold greater weight?
OpenBSD will undoubtedly be forced to fork LLVM 8, and likely have to take on the burden of asking individual developers to dual-license contributions they backport going forward. This will place them in a similar position they had with GCC, since the GPLv3 license change.
[0] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/e688c2b0648a80551cf735...
[1] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/9866f44de26a847eaed067...
[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/c0f0c565f0b312e55b410b...
Mark Kettenis formal rejection on behalf of the OpenBSD project: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-April/112300.h...
We did listen, but we have specific goals that after a great deal of discussion are best addressed with the approach of the Apache 2 license. The objection was to those goals in many ways, not to the particular mechanisms.
And we really did listen to the concerns about the goals (specifically providing strong protection against patent issues) but there was strong consensus in the community that this was a real problem we wanted to address, and so we moved forward.
I am truly sad that this will cause issues w/ the OpenBSD community, but we had consensus and needed to make progress.
The reason for relicensing were to do with Patents.
Do ALL Patents have be under Contract law and not under Copyright law?
Or it is actually possible to have a license that fits the spirit of BSD, with GPL compatibility while having patents protection without the objection of OpenBSD ideals?
I'm not entirely sure how patent grant drags in contract law, though. It might be the fact that it implies reciprocal patent grants. You might have to ask a lawyer for the distinguishing issue here.