To others: I presume what the parent comment is complaining about is that companies are legally allowed to modify the llvm source and distribute those binaries without source code.
This is not a bad thing, unless you're an open source zealot.
From the URL above:
> We intend to keep LLVM perpetually open source and to use a liberal open source license.
and
> We believe this fosters the widest adoption of LLVM because it allows commercial products to be derived from LLVM with few restrictions and without a requirement for making any derived works also open source (i.e. LLVM’s license is not a “copyleft” license like the GPL).
Yes, in some circumstances that's true. For example, recently I think it was a GNU codec library that was released under a permissive license, because there are plenty of proprietary video codec libraries and for a free format to win, a permissively-licensed library is useful.
But Stallman put the GCC under the GPLv3.
So I don't think your comments re: papacy are terribly on-point.
"They have also traded away a way to encourage others to keep it open in return for wider adoption."
s/encourage/force/
If you have to force people to do what you want, who cares.
Leading is about getting people to go in a direction they may not want to go.
Not pushing them off a cliff.
Many of us read the site always in this manner. While arguably this post (and a small but significant minority of others) are false positives, I find that most of the [flagkilled] posts are removed for good reason. The current system has flaws, but is not "complete nonsense".
http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license
To others: I presume what the parent comment is complaining about is that companies are legally allowed to modify the llvm source and distribute those binaries without source code.
This is not a bad thing, unless you're an open source zealot.
From the URL above:
> We intend to keep LLVM perpetually open source and to use a liberal open source license.
and
> We believe this fosters the widest adoption of LLVM because it allows commercial products to be derived from LLVM with few restrictions and without a requirement for making any derived works also open source (i.e. LLVM’s license is not a “copyleft” license like the GPL).
This is reasonable.