I can sympathize with RMS's argument that companies like Apple & Google can create plugins and modules that are proprietary because LLVM/Clang has a non-copyleft license.
However, it would not be in any contributing companies favor to avoid pushing changes back up stream. The pool of people work together to solve really hard problems and they all need to be on the same page. Otherwise that work will become extremely hard to maintain when merges do need to happen.
Maybe I do not understand the licensing, but since LLVM is "more" free, couldn't RMS and his FSF members create a GPLv3 version of it that meets his goal?
> Maybe I do not understand the licensing, but since LLVM is "more" free, couldn't RMS and his FSF members create a GPLv3 version of it that meets his goal?
Yes, if you could get together a lot of people you could fork llvm under a different license -- GPL or proprietary. But forking to GPL would a) be a bit rude, and perhaps more importantly b) most likely just be a dead fork. You would have to contribute a fairly significant patch (I can't think of anything that would qualify at this stage of LLVM/Clang maturity) under GPL for "most" to want to use your version.
So, no, they can't practically do that, even if the license permits it.
And at any rate; c) Since the architecture of LLVM allows proprietary extensions, even if Clang/LLVM was under the GPL big changes would be needed to "force" the GPL on things like CUDA compilers etc.
(This is the point that ERS originally raised, arguably with limited knowledge of actual modern architecture of GCC, that GCC is artificially kept monolithic and by extension tied to a technically inferior architecture).
However, it would not be in any contributing companies favor to avoid pushing changes back up stream. The pool of people work together to solve really hard problems and they all need to be on the same page. Otherwise that work will become extremely hard to maintain when merges do need to happen.
Maybe I do not understand the licensing, but since LLVM is "more" free, couldn't RMS and his FSF members create a GPLv3 version of it that meets his goal?