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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?

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> never gave back anything

Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean?

Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM.

I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).

LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided.

The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.

Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too

Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least.

And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.

>Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM.

It was originally supposed to. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

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