Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

If LLVM and Swift are GPL'd they can't develop additions to them, ship them on their Macbooks, and not publish the changes to the rest of the internet.

This is true if you redistribute the GPL code of others.

However, as the copyright holders, Apple are free to release their code under whatever license they wish, or to refrain from releasing it. They can ship it on MacBooks, and are under no obligation to release the source code.

You could argue that they couldn't accept GPLd submissions anyway, but since they'd require copyright assignment in any case it's a moot point.

View on HN

Oh crap, you're completely right. Good point.

The bit about copyright assignment is significant though. There is a way for Apple to ensure the community that they will not screw them over for embracing their language. I think it would be prudent for the community to ask for that.

I guess one aspect is that LLVM (which Apple doesn't completely own, as far as I know) should have been copylefted to begin with, then any changes (like adding a language) would need to be shared with the community.

The exact same situation happened with Objective C and GCC. In that case, the Objective C frontend was released as free software.

> which Apple doesn't completely own, as far as I know

Apple don't own LLVM at all - they hired Chris Lattner who was one of the original directors of the project when it started at the University of Illinois.

> should have been copylefted to begin with

Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

> Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

You mean the ones that haven't provided LLVM with changes for the compilers they are selling?

They might not have "provided LLVM with changes for the compilers they are selling" but they have provided TONS AND TONS of changes and fixes and new features for the core LLVM infrastructure.

I could not care less about having the changes to their compilers, and I would even dislike it if LLVM's license required them to do so if that meant they wouldn't touch LLVM in the first place -- in which case we wouldn't get all these core LLVM improvements.

Replying to stephenr:

> Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

No, because the freedom of new languages in LLVM would be guarenteed.

Again, you can of course have the opinion that this is not important, or not as important as the success of LLVM, but that's your decision.

>the freedom of new languages in LLVM would be guarenteed.

No, the GPL does not work that way.

If LLVM was GPL it wouldn't make any difference. LLVM is modular. You can write a front end that generates LLVM IR, then pass that LLVM IR file to LLVM to be compiled. It would be no different then a program that generates bitmaps and then passes them to another program to be jpeg encoded. The licence of the jpeg encoder doesn't affect the licence of your bitmap generating code.

This is why GCC is not modular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com