Andrei's Google Talk

[Don]

retard wrote:
> Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:14:09 -0400, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:46:19 -0400, Bruno Medeiros
>> <brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail> wrote:
>>
>>> On 20/09/2010 16:13, klickverbot wrote:
>>>> On 9/20/10 5:10 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>>> I find myself wishing some more OSS projects had commercial-friendly
>>>>> licenses. :-/ In particular LLVM, as I do agree it might have been
>>>>> great
>>>>> if Walter were able to work with it without these IP worries.
>>>> You want something even more liberal than BSD?
>>> Oh, from this discussion, I thought LLVM was GPL or LGPL, but not BSD
>>> (or more concretely, a variant of BSD from what I see).
>>>
>>> What is the issue then of Walter taking a look at the LLVM code? It
>>> does not seem to be the case that LLVM would send lawyers to anyone.
>> BSD includes a binary attribution clause (not sure about LLVM), which
>> makes it undesirable license for commercial use.
>>
>> The issue is taint.  I find this aspect of copyright and licensing
>> highly dubious (I can barely remember what I did last week, not to
>> mention some souce code I read last year), but the issue is this:  Let's
>> say Walter does read LLVM source code, and then works on another
>> compiler project for another company that is completely proprietary. 
>> LLVM has some possible connection to interject and say "you have to give
>> LLVM developers credit," even if Walter didn't copy any code.  Yeah,
>> it's ridiculous and absurd, but possible.
> 
> So the another company goes bankrupt if Walter has to mention the name 
> 'LLVM developers' in the documentation nobody reads and in an About 
> dialog nobody ever reads? I understand this when the other project (LLVM 
> in this case) has some viral license like GPL, but in this case they only 
> expect moral attribution. Your ideology is sick: "we must steal as much 
> as possible from the open source dickheads without giving attribution, 
> and turn the code into proprietary DRM shit to enslave the world muhahaha"

I think there's no problem with using the liberal license in a compiler, 
or in fact in any app. Walter deliberately errs on the paranoid side, 
because of past court experiences he's had.

It's only in the standard library that the licensing can be a problem -- 
we don't want "hello world" to require binary attribution.