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FreeBSD Throws the Clang/LLVM Switch: Future Releases Use LLVM
An anonymous reader writes "Brooks Davis has announced that the FreeBSD Project has now officially switched to Clang/LLVM as C/C++ compiler. This follows several years of preparation, feeding back improvements to the Clang and LLVM source code bases, and nightly builds of FreeBSD using LLVM over two years. Future snapshots and all major FreeBSD releases will ship compiled with LLVM by default!"
That's nice - you can freely obtain the version of BSD that later became Apples Mac OSX. That doesn't really allow you to use it on a Mac now does it? It doesn't do anything for you should you want to tweak the OS on your Mac - not a darn thing. Now that's fine, people who put out code under a BSD license are OK with that. Others want ALL users of their code to have access to the source of derivative works too and they put a GPL license on it.
But imagine if the BSD projects today failed due to lack of interest. Then the authors die, the archived copies go offline and disappear. Now all that's left is a proprietary product built on that formerly open work. One can argue that the BSD developers would be happy that their work lives on, but one can also see that someone else would be upset that their work is no longer open even though it is widely used. As and aside - I wonder how said BSD developer would feel if someone took the BSD code, changed it to GPL (interesting that that's allowed, but hey the original is still available) and eventually the GPL branch was the only one in existence.
There are two different views and for that there are two different license. I wish people firmly in each camp could clearly see and appreciate the reasons for the others existence rather than saying they're philosophy is wrong in some way. IMHO GPL is preferable from a philosophical point of view, but BSD can be (I think) more practical in some cases.