Intel Releases Threading Library Under GPL 2

littlefoo writes "Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commercial only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commercial offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release: 'Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.'"

Comments

Re:GPL 2 only

[networkBoy]

Which is perfectly fine. I have a friend at Intel and based on what I've heard of the corporate culture, open ended licenses are a no-go. That doesn't mean they won't later release under GPL v3, just that they want their lawyers to have a chance to review any license they release under and don't want to be beholden to the unknown. Frankly I think that's a good thing. In theory GPLv4 could say: this can be used in closed source proprietary DRM schemes. and if they had the "or later" clause they would have to allow it.
-nB