[Beltalowda]

> Besides, LLVM wouldn't have gotten investment to begin with if it were GPL licensed. The entire reason for Apple's investment in LLVM in the first place is that it wasn't GPL.

I don't think that's the case; Apple/LLVM actually offered to sign over the copyright to the FSF, under the GPL; from https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

> The patch I'm working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment. Initially, I intend to link the LLVM libraries in from the existing LLVM distribution, mainly to simplify my work. This code is licensed under a BSD-like license [8], and LLVM itself will not initially be assigned to the FSF. If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.

The reason people worked on LLVM/clang is that GCC was (and to some degree, is) not very good in various areas, and had a difficult community making fixing those issues hard. There's a reason a lot of these newer languages like Swift, Rust, and Zig are based on LLVM and not GCC. See e.g. https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070915195203#p... for a run-down (from 2007, I'm not sure how many of these issues persist today; gcc has not stood still either of course, error messages are much better than they were in 2007 for example).

GPL3 changed things a bit; I'm not sure Lattner would have made the same offer with GPL3 around, but that was from 2005 when GPL3 didn't exist yet. But the idea that LLVM was primarily motivated by license issues doesn't seem to be the case, although it was probably seen as an additional benefit.