If LLVM were under a copyleft license like the GPL, Apple could still have created it's backend in secret to time its release with the new iPhone.
BSD style licenses leave the community at the mercy of corporate interests. If Apple decides not to release[1] its backend, too bad, and we all play catch-up.
[1] "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." Steve Jobs
* Use GCC's C frontend to write a code analysis tool of any sort,
* Write a new frontend to GCC.
FSF's damage to the GCC code base proved that you can still sabotage freedom while adhering to the letter of a copyleft license.
I suspect the KHTML mess is still fresh in the minds of many engineers at Apple.
You say that as if making such a dramatic license change would affect nothing else besides the rate at which changes made by companies get released to the wild. That's preposterous. If LLVM were GPL'd then Apple would not be using it. Full stop.
Incorrect. Apple was perfectly happy using the GPLv2 based gcc for years and years and years. The thing that made them strike out and look for something new was the GPLv3 [1]. If LLVM were GPLv2 Apple would have no reason not to use it.
Incidentally, does anyone know which part of the GPLv3 they don't like? Is it the patent clause or the Tivoization clause? My personal feeling is it must be the patent clause since none of the interesting GPL stuff (bash, Emacs, or the unix command line stuff) even ships on iOS.
[1] Also the same reason they're stuck shipping the 5 year old version of Emacs (22.1) and Bash (3.2) in their current release.
Not really, Steve Jobs always disliked it, because FSF forced them to open source Objective-C when NeXT used gcc as their backed.
http://www.anonymous-insider.net/free-software/research/1989...
At this point, LLVM and clang largely are Apple. This complaining about the timeline of the open source release of their own work is a bit nuts.
Yep, Release them as early as possible so Samsung could copy and sit there does nothing? And Solving 64bit issues of what? The whole thing surprise the industry because Absolutely NO one was expecting an ARMv8 64bit chip on market until late 2014!
[1] Apple try to open it as standard, and they got sued by Patents Trolls. And are still battling it in court.
The LLVM people released theirs under a BSD style license precisely so that people and companies could do things like this
If "the community" wastes their time solving ARM 64-bit problems it's their own fault for not waiting for Apple's code.
There is an existing implementation, Apple's implementation and hence it will take at least several months to merge the two, legal sign off and then committed.