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Which part of dxil/dxc is proprietary exactly? Trying to make sense of the license barf at https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler


The license (and the code) for dxil.dll/libdxil.so isn't in that repo, they just include the blob in releases. If you look at a release you'll see an additional LICENSE-MS.txt that just covers that dxil signing library.


On the latest release https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/releases/...

There are "source code" files in zip and tar.gz

Aren't those source code for those dlls?


No, that’s a GitHub thing — it just downloads the Git repo at that release tag, which doesn’t include the source code in this case


How is that compatible with the GPL licence from autoconf?


Looks like the only autoconf bit they use is an old copy of config.guess that was used in the LLVM they forked from (I think they've since taken it out entirely in the LLVM upstream).

There's actually a carveout in config.guess's license that lets you redistribute it under whatever license you want but only if you're actually using an autoconf-based build. The LLVM version this is based off of only uses config.guess and not anything else from autoconf, so that carveout doesn't apply. Instead LLVM just relied on the fact that config.guess is only getting called via the command line, so the GPL's "virality" doesn't apply; LLVM (and now Microsoft) just distributed config.guess separately licensed as GPL alongside their code.


GPL doesn't care about inclusion or linking, it cares about derivative work. And somehow I doubt the 3d engine is derivative work of a piece of autoconf.


You mean the config.guess script?

That's a completely different program. GPL doesn't jump across programs.


The source code for dxil.dll is not part of that repo.


Looks like this is another case of "Microsoft loves Open Source" then.


If someone says they love pizza, do you call them a faker every time they eat something else?


Are any libraries from the Windows SDK open source? Windows application code calling into libraries that are not open source is nothing new.




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