In fairness, this was just a proposal (from someone who clearly has more knowledge of engineering than law). They got feedback that this isn't how the AGPL works, and decided to go with a commercial license for the macOS version instead. Which is annoying for me, as I was hoping to use mold on macOS and the monthly subscription seems a bit steep for a linker, but it seems like a perfectly reasonable license.

Problem with my open-source startup: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kiW9qmNlJ9oQZM6r5o4_N54s... Worth a read and I'm sure Rui would appreciate ways to resolve this.

This whole thread is old. He already split the Mac version into a separate commercial product.

wow. that borders on extortion... "you should really buy a license... who knows, otherwise your code might turn into AGPL, good luck with the expensive court fees..."

What the heck? You can get an AGPL linker for free, or pay for a non-AGPL one. This type of thing is standard in OS. Selling a product isn't extortion.

It is unusual for the products of compilers and linkers to be infected by the original license. See: gcc.

That aspect is unusual, but I don't see how that affects whether or not it would be license extortion.

I don't recall seeing a single developer tool where the output was anything other than fully under the copyright of the author of the input files (or fully liberally licensed in the case of additional code objects).

Selling is not extortion, no. That's not what I claimed. But did you read the quote?

> mold stays in AGPL, but _we claim AGPL propagates to the linker's output_ [...] I don't know if this claim will hold in court, but just buying a sold license would be much easier than using mold in an AGPL-incompatible way and challenging the claim in court.

Sounds like protection money to me

Why is the AGPL such an issue?

It's not, if it's contained to just the linker itself (which it is now), that's not why I stopped using it. I did so because it seems like they don't understand that much about AGPL and licensing in general and could change their license terms at any point to say something like "we claim AGPL propagates to the linker's output" which is very legally tenuous itself to claim so.

Tenuous or not, I believe GCC explicitly has a licensing exception that states that compiler output is not considered a derivative work of the compiler, and thus must also be licensed under the GPL. So the GNU/FSF folks at least thought it was a concerning enough legal idea to explicitly account for it.

Not sure we can say that a linker is the same as a compiler in this sense, but if so, maybe it is indeed worrisome.

It does not look like binutils (including ld.gold) has that exception[0], so I don't think the FSF would agree.

[0] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob;f=READ...

If I recall correctly it is the standard libraries(such as libstdc++) that need this exception and not the compiler itself.

That exception exists because compilers have a tendency to leave little bits of itself in code that they compile. For example, if you're compiling to a target that doesn't have a division instruction, you're going to be using a compiler-provided division routine that gets combined in with the source code. And that routine is a clear part of the compiler's source code.

The standard compiler license exception (this applies to LLVM to, e.g.) says that any such code that gets combined in with your application code doesn't count. Note that it's still a potential license violation to use that code elsewhere (say, using those routines in another compiler).

This isn't a concern for linkers because linkers don't really provide anything in the way of code, everything being provided by the compiler as a compiler or language support library. The largest code it might add to your program is probably the PLT stub code, at best a couple of instructions long.

It's not an issue for linking AGPL code.

The issue was that they wanted to claim that AGPL was contagious - That by using mold, your outputs would also be required to become AGPL.

Normally the tools people use don’t dictate the license they must use for their code.

The point of copyleft is to dictate the licence you must use, if you wish to (roughly speaking) link with the copyleft-licensed work. There are plenty of libraries that you cannot use if you wish to distribute your program without making its source-code available.

The unusual thing here is that the creators of a linker are apparently trying to have the copyleft licence propagate to code that is input to the linker. Others have pointed out that GCC has exceptions for this kind of thing, despite that it is released under a strong copyleft licence (GPLv3+).

No, the point of Copyleft is for you to not restrict the freedoms you got when you used the software when distributing it to others. You can use Copylefted software in any way to your heart's content in combination with whatever other software you want, you can just not distribute it using a more restrictive licence.

This level of detail is incidental to my point, hence roughly speaking. Even the GNU folks summarise copyleft essentially as I have. [0]

Also, your account of copyleft is still incorrect. It's true of the GPLv2 and GPLv3 licences but not true of all copyleft licences. The AGPLv3 licence, which is the one relevant here, doesn't apply only on distribution.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

edit I think I was mistaken in putting propagate to code that is input to the linker, though. As lokar's comment points out, it's instead about the output of the linker.

It depends if you find it acceptable that the work you created gets assigned the AGPL license. However, this problem was already solved at this point, so it's a non-issue these days.

One practical problem, even for developers who are fine with licensing their code to whatever open source license is easiest, is that not all open source licenses are AGPL compatible. Take for example the Mozilla Public License, which is inherently incompatible with AGPL because of the terms imposed; this means that any project using MPL licensed libraries could no longer be linked with Mold.

License incompatibilities can be a huge pain (see: ZFS + Linux). If you develop software for yourself this isn't a problem, but if you intend to distribute your software this becomes more of an issue.

This is probably also the main reason why normal linkers/compilers don't impose licenses on the produced work.

That only claims the output is AGPL, not the code you feed into it.

So just use mold during development and another linker for release.

Which do you use for testing?

Personally I would use mold for the dev cycle tests and then in CI or prerelease tests use the other linker

> this type of policy changes on a whim

Ehh...

"I want to share another idea in this post to keep it open-source [..] Let me know what you guys think" is not a "policy change on a whim". It's an idea. It was not "walked back" on, because it was ... just an idea.

Your comment is a horrible misrepresentation of what's actually in the post.

If you were a big corporation who doesn't want to buy a license but speed up dev time, couldn't you just let your devs use mold for development to have faster recompilation cycles, but link the official binaries with some other, slower linker?