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by hashtag-til 876 days ago
Many thousands of companies use LLVM in their products and benefit from the technology.

As it is an open source project, in an ideal world, it would e fair to assume they would somehow contribute back, but instead they just take it for granted as there is a group of people who make it available for free.

(please read to the end before posting your "wHy pUt iT oPeN-sOuRcE tHeN???" bigoted comments)

Don't get me wrong: It is perfectly legal for anyone to do so, as the project is available under a permissive license and you are not mandated to do anything to contribute back.

I'm just trying to clarify the point made by OP here, and clarifying that some infrastructure tooling such as compilers and debugger are often taken for granted, and even rich companies opt not to contribute back.

1 comments

> they just take it for granted

I just looked at 1 page of the most recent commits to the LLVM project and every single one of them is from a corporate developer. I can't imagine how to arrive at the conclusion that the industry takes LLVM for granted. The major LLVM subprojects that I follow are not just largely written and maintained by large companies, but were also initially invented and contributed by them.

And how many companies are those? FAANG, major linux distros, plus a small list?

Now compare that with the corporate user base…