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Comment by notaplumber | Hacker News Reader

http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536...

It's stated as much in the initial proposal.

"1) Some contributors are actively blocked from contributing code to LLVM."

> These contributors have been holding back patches for quite some time that they’d like to upstream. Corporate contributors (in particular) often have patents on many different things, and while it is reasonable for them to grant access to patents related to LLVM, the wording in the Developer Policy can be interpreted to imply that unrelated parts of their IP could accidentally be granted to LLVM (through “scope creep”).

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This is not even remotely the same as "a handful of corporations" or "not in the best interest of the open source community".

Also, you elided the other 2 large reasons given, which don't support your point at all.

For example, GCC has an exception for its runtime libraries that it now applies universally for the exact same reasons - desire to share code, etc.

It has that problem even reusing code from other GNU projects as well!

> This is a complicated topic that deals with legal issues and our primary goal is to unblock contributions from specific corporate contributors.

You were saying?

The interesting thing is that the vast majority (and for the first year+ all) of the contributors to LLVM who donated massive amounts of time and resources to make the relicensing happen were not from any company that was blocked from contributing.

I happen to know because I was one person who donated my time. I was not in any way blocked. We were trying to find a way to help more people (and yes, companies, because companies tend to pay people) contribute to LLVM because that is one of the things that makes the project stronger.

So saying that the change was driven by these handful of contributors seems really off base. And in fact, my experience during the process was that the most motivated people were individual contributors, if anything pushing and pulling companies along (by finding good ways to address their potential concerns with any change like this).

Anyways, that was my experience from being involved in the process. YMMV of course.

That doesn't change the reasons stated in the proposal email. Even if the final legwork was orchestrated by individual contributors, it's clear that the reasons were to appease corporations and not the community at large.

It would be unlikely for any open source project to begin such a massive undertaking to re-license, from an already permissive license, without at least some corporate incentive/initiative to do so. No doubt lawyers were paid.

I understand what you're saying, but it is also being disingenuous.

"That doesn't change the reasons stated in the proposal email. Even if the final legwork was orchestrated by individual contributors, it's clear that the reasons were to appease corporations and not the community at large."

Except it's not, since the community was the one who desired those contributions in the first place.

Seriously. You are going off making a lot of assertions without knowledge, evidence, or data.

Truthfully, if this is how the community you belong to operates, i'm somewhat glad they will no longer use LLVM.

> it's clear that the reasons were to appease corporations and not the community at large.

That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation. The reality is there are companies who want to upstream their changes, but can't given the current license.

It's better for the community as a whole if more people/teams contribute their changes back, and that would be one of the benefits of the relicense.

It seems like you're making a dichotomy between corporations and the community. However corps are a big part of the community! They are leveraging LLVM in many different products, and individuals in the community are frequently paid by various companies to work on LLVM to improve these products.

It is a privilege as a community member to be able to be paid to work on a project like LLVM. I'm so grateful the community has such a healthy relationship with both academia and corporations.

Many community members at the yearly conference mention that they have custom patches that they can't upstream because of licensing issue. Improving this means to me that we can extend the community and make it stronger.

Except those were very specifically not the same corporations who pushed/desired the relicensing, so this makes no sense.

Of course, you are off asserting a whole bunch of stuff with no data or knowledge, so i don't think that will stop you.

Additionally, you keep asserting/repeating it's "not for the benefit of the community at large" or "in the interests or desire of the community".

Can you please cite any evidence of that?

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