Interesting. Programmers today do tend to think that LLVM is a revolutionary miracle, and border on worshipping it's creator.
It was actually offered to GNU years ago but (if I read the thread correctly) rms didn't get the email because of the unique way he does email.
It's a shame it's not under the GPL, you can already see a sign of the future (present?) in apple not upstreaming their backends.
Their aversion to the GPL seems mostly cultural, which is interesting given that we skewer microsoft for their sins along those lines 20 years ago now.
It's the same reason why bash and rsync have not been upgraded on macOS to newer versions: they also started using GPL3.
And so they avoid it.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
It might also be about patents since IIRC [L]GPLv3 requires that if you use a [L]GPLv3'd program and that program infringes some of your patents then you are not allowed to sue others over their use of your patents in the same program.
* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49906/why-is-freebs...
GPL3 is more restrictive than GPL2, which in turn is more restrictive than BSD/MIT, in the name of allowing other freedoms for end-users.
Interesting anecdote. Do you have a source for that?
I don't understand the bits about RMS' email configuration, but in that message in 2015 he indicated that he did not know about the offer in 2005 to give copyright of LLVM to the FSF.
Apparently rms never saw the email because of his server arrangement?
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support
And the bitcode used by Apple Store for application delivery isn't 100% like the LLVM bitcode.
Historically they've been very good about upstreaming. Sometimes it takes a while, but so far everything made it to the public repo.
It's quite common for long standing forks to exist, where changes get pushed upstream from the fork, and the fork gets periodically re-cut.
It looks to me like it’s the exact opposite, based solely on your link that is. Based on your link, they lag _behind_ upstream (vs being _ahead_ of upstream as you indicated) and don’t offer the same features, without a delay anyway, in “Apple Clang” that are in “Clang”.
We live in a post-FSF world, I think people are taking for granted the bean counters playing nice with open source software.
Why is this a reason for optimism? Because it shifts the outlet for innovation elsewhere. Costs of manufacturing will drop as competition in the fab space increases. I think RISC-V is a sign of things to come. There is great potential for open and amateur hardware.