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And considering all the interesting work that OpenBSD is doing to Clang, i.e: retguard [0] [1], ROP gadget reduction framework [2]. Ignoring the fact that two major open source *BSD operating systems use and ship LLVM/Clang as their default system compiler. Their entire system compiled with clang, LLD as the default linker for an increasing number of supported platforms. A ports tree with between 10,000 (OpenBSD) to 30,000 (FreeBSD) ports compiled with Clang, maintaining patches upstreams won't take..

.. You might think that objection would be listened to more readily, or do the interest of a handful of corporations hold greater weight?

OpenBSD will undoubtedly be forced to fork LLVM 8, and likely have to take on the burden of asking individual developers to dual-license contributions they backport going forward. This will place them in a similar position they had with GCC, since the GPLv3 license change.

[0] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/e688c2b0648a80551cf735...

[1] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/9866f44de26a847eaed067...

[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/c0f0c565f0b312e55b410b...

Mark Kettenis formal rejection on behalf of the OpenBSD project: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-April/112300.h...



FreeBSD is OK with the license, so AFAIK, it is just OpenBSD.

We did listen, but we have specific goals that after a great deal of discussion are best addressed with the approach of the Apache 2 license. The objection was to those goals in many ways, not to the particular mechanisms.

And we really did listen to the concerns about the goals (specifically providing strong protection against patent issues) but there was strong consensus in the community that this was a real problem we wanted to address, and so we moved forward.

I am truly sad that this will cause issues w/ the OpenBSD community, but we had consensus and needed to make progress.


I think I know what you mean when you say "consensus" here, but that's not what "consensus" really means. Perhaps you want a word more like "majority".




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