Re: Contributing LLVM.org patches to gud.el

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 09 2015, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
>> If I had seen it back then, I would not have had the benefit of
>> hindsight, but it would clearly have been a real possibility.  Nothing
>> would have ruled it out.
>
> Has somebody asked Chris Lattner, who seems to the leader on the LLVM
> project, if they are willing to change the license now to simplify
> coexistence with the GCC project?

Sorry, but that's rubbish.  LLVM is licensed under the UI/NCSAOSL
license which is compatible with all versions of the GPL.  Everybody has
the freedom to take the code and incorporate it into a GPL-licensed
work.  You can take whatever LLVM code you want and integrate it into
GCC while licensing your changes under any GPL version.

There is absolutely nothing the LLVM team could do more other than
assigning all of their copyrights to the FSF in order to hand over
licensing and development control.  And seeing how GCC fares with that
regarding extensibility, I would not exactly blame them when they are
not interested in that.  But I'd be surprised if such a ridiculous idea
had even crossed their mind.

At any rate, I seem to remember that somebody else mentioned in this
thread Apple having offered to contribute their Clang/Dragonegg work to
GCC proper and getting rejected.  So it seems that this option even was
on the table at one point of time in history.

> His answer would be more interesting than speculations about Apple's
> intentions.

If you are interested in seeing how people react to ridiculous requests,
maybe.

This is at the current point of time entirely our problem.  If we wanted
to start a GPLed fork or variant of LLVM, we would be free to do so.

-- 
David Kastrup