Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DannyBee 3567 days ago
LLVM explicitly chose not to create a new license (this was one of the goals of doing this).

The issues we faced were simply those of license compatibility and attribution for runtime libraries, and we chose what we saw as the simplest set of additional permissions to make those work.

(For example, if we didn't care about the usage of LLVM in GPL software, we could have avoided all of the exception related wording here. Instead, we tried to come up with something that would let them still be able to use LLVM without worrying about various compatibility boogeymen)
1 comments
carussell 3567 days ago
Why not MPL2? Are there enough people (i.e., Apple) making file-level changes they don't want to publish that MPL2 was too unattractive here?
link
jcranmer 3567 days ago
MPL2 requires that you make available the source of any changed files. Apple builds its version of LLVM off of a patched tree, and given that they're not particularly open about even the base revision of the public LLVM repositories their stuff is on, I can't imagine they would be happy having to publish those files publicly.
link
DannyBee 3566 days ago
Yes. We want folks to be able to keep their private chips private.

Past that, Mpl has some interesting baggage and requirements, and in the end, folks wanted something they all understood well, felt others would understand well, etc.

It's not a bad license, mind you. This was just the best path in terms of resistance, complexity, etc

link