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!"

Comments

Grin

[Whiteox]

I'm just so HAPPY!

Re:Grin

[fm6]

For us non-BSD muggles, please explain why.

Re:Grin

[Anonymous Coward]

For us non-BSD muggles, please explain why.

Basic alphabet fetish. After all, "BSD", the abbreviation for "Berkeley Software Distribution", is more letters than the abbreviation for "Linux", which would just be "L". Thus, it only follows that "LLVM" appeals to him more than the simple "GCC", which is only three letters, and thus old and stupid.

Re:Grin

[Anonymous Coward]

This explains it well: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/49970/7345

Re:Grin

[ByOhTek]

Generally a lot of BSD users don't like the GPL, and getting rid of a GPLed compiler makes them quite happy.

Also, although I've heard a lot about the inner workings of GCC being rather intertwined and convoluted, whereas LLVM is simpler to work with and modify (not sure how true this is).

Re:Grin

[Nadir]

Because he's free from Free

Re:Grin

[Creepy]

It isn't necessarily an issue with the GPL (aside from 3 being invasive, which I personally have an issue with and so do the lawyers I work with) - I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.

I worked for a CAD software company (we were bought by a huge multinational conglomerate, so I technically still work for them, but I moved around and rarely touch CAD these days). In our former incarnation, we sold exactly no hardware and were bundled with exactly zero hardware, but ran on pretty much every platform imaginable (9 at one point, but much fewer now, since our customers are mostly moving to Linux or Windows). Giving away our software (not to mention the source code) would be a really bad business model, but to appease those in RMS's dream world, we'd need to find hardware partners and give it away for free with the hardware and be paid by the hardware vendor - but since we have to give away source, we'd more than likely use an in-house developed proprietary language to make porting as difficult as possible. This, in fact, is a BAD and not very open business model - if we'd been bought by our current owner, we'd almost certainly be proprietary software for their hardware and not run on platforms like Linux or even Windows. This happens in the console world all the time - when Microsoft bought Bungie, they basically shafted what Bungie was known for - mac games (and took a year to release Halo on Windows/Mac to keep it XBox exclusive as long as possible to the ire of Steve Jobs - later releases became XBox exclusive). If you think that is a good thing, great for you - I don't. Incidentally, the part of the company I work for has an open data model as well - that makes it easy for customers to switch, but we are doing our jobs well because few actually do.

I've been at odds with RMS over this for years...

Re:Grin

[fnj]

It has little to do with "liking" or "disliking" the GPL. It has more to do with the GPL being incompatible with BSD's own license (and just about any other license). It's true there is a compile firewall with gcc, but it is still a less than ideal situation. BSD is also going to bring out a GPL-free C++11 stack.

Re:Grin

[Anonymous Coward]

With BSD software, not only are you giving away the source code, but you are giving it away with even fewer restrictions than with GPL.

What's that you say? You want to take the software that other people have released and use it in your closed source product? Well then of course you like BSD software better. But you can obviously see why many people who write the open software prefer a GPL style.

Re:Grin

[DeathFromSomewhere]

is there a reason for not making the front ends dynamic libraries which could be linked by any program that wants to parse source code?

Quoth the Stallman himself:

One of our main goals for GCC is to prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software. Thus, we have deliberately avoided many things that might possibly have the effect of facilitating such usage, even if that consequence wasn't a certainty. We're looking for new methods now to try to prevent this, and the outcome of this search would be very important in our decision of what to do.

Not only is the poor design true, it was very intentional. This is why we need the LLVM project. KDevelop and such shouldn't have to write their own compiler front ends to get feature parity with Visual Studio; but right now they do.

Re:Grin

[Zenin]

With BSD software, not only are you giving away the source code, but you are giving it away with even fewer restrictions than with GPL.

But you're not forced to give all of it away, as you effectively are with the GPL.

If you've created something that you'd like to give back to the community, you can. -And it's very often in your own best interests to do so. If however, you've created something that, at least for now, you'd prefer not to give away, well you're free to do that instead.

The BSD model has proven that you don't need to twist peoples arms to get them to give back generously to the community. It's proven that people can have the freedom to choose whatever business model they feel is best for them, and the community still benefits greatly. Often more so then a GPL model.

GPL... Among many freedoms it takes away, it destroys the freedom to select a business model of your choice. And worse, the few business models that the GPL does allow for are intrinsically very, very bad on the whole. You're either forcing odd hardware/software partnerships like the poster above, or you're relying upon creating sloppy software and weak documentation in order to ensure a market for your "support services". The later, IMHO, is a primary cause behind the quality issues that have forever plagued GPL software quality, design, and documentation.

Re:Grin

[jandrese]

It's also hell on people who want to make a better debugger than gdb. I have always been frustrated by how terrible gdb is at handling threaded code, and amused that it was endless threading bugs that kept Hurd from ever reaching a usable state.

Re:Grin

[Paul Jakma]

The GPL doesn't force you to give the software away. You can sell it. Indeed, RMS himself used to **sell** tapes of GPL software to fund the FSF. RedHat make *billions* on per-seat licensing of GPL software. Nor does GPL software force you, as an author, to GPL all the software. As the author you are completely free to draw the line as you wish between which bits of your software are GPL and which proprietary. You just grant yourself an exception.

What the GPL *does* do, which a BSD licence does not, is protect you from anyone who tries to take your source and then make their own proprietary modificaitions. If you released your code as GPL you can now sue them, and get damages. If you released as BSD, you can't - they are free to make closed modifications to your code (as Apple have done with FreeBSD).

You're at odds with RMS, congratulations, but you're also falling quite a bit short in your understanding of the licences you do and don't have issues with.

Re:Grin

[Sponge Bath]

...prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software

Sounds similar to arguments against a stable driver interface for the Linux kernel.

Re:Grin

[Tough Love]

I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.

Richard Stallman's model says such thing. It says "if you want to save costs by using this source code then you must make your changes available to whoever uses it."

Re:Grin

[the_B0fh]

I think a lot of people miss the point. The copyright owner chooses the license. If you don't like the license, don't use it (as FreeBSD did).

Whether you are forced to share or not should be one of thing things the project/company should decide on early. If it's not important, then it doesn't matter. If it *is* important, then select the appropriate license.

It is not like you can pay Microsoft for a windows license, and then violate their license (remember hacking windows NT workstation to run IIS server?) and think it wouldn't get you into trouble. Same thing here.

If you don't like the license, don't use it. Write your own. Simple as that.

Don't understand why people keep making it such a huge issue.

Re:Grin

[statusbar]

Here are some very interesting, compelling reasons to switch to Clang:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Clang-Defending-C-from-Murphy-s-Million-Monkeys

Re:Grin

[Rich0]

Hu? Let say you release a part of your software under GPL and "draw a line" for the rest, I'm entitled to ask you to release the whole thing under GPL, unless you're able to prove that the part you put on the other side of the line is not a derivative work of GPL'd part.

Only if you wrote part of it. If I write a program and release half of it under the GPL, the only person who can sue me over it is me.

The GPL is only an issue if you want to steal other people's code. It doesn't force you to do anything with code you write, unless you mix it with code you didn't write and don't have a license to use (other than the GPL).

Re:Grin

[gomiam]

Let say you release a part of your software under GPL and "draw a line" for the rest, I'm entitled to ask you to release the whole thing under GPL, unless you're able to prove that the part you put on the other side of the line is not a derivative work of GPL'd part. In other word, you cannot release half of a software as GPL.

You can ask me to release the source code. But there is a problem: if everything we are talking about was completely made by me, then I own the rights to it. It doesn't matter whether I create new versions of it and don't publish the source code to them: it is my code. GPL applies to people who don't own the copyright to the work (that is you and everyone else in this case). So you can ask until you are blue in the face and I may ignore you as it suits me. Nothing personal to it, mind you.

Of course, if I try to close my version of someone else's source code which is licensed under the GPL, then you would be entitled to obtain it from me if you bought a copy of my binaries... and I should comply.

Re:Grin

[Tough Love]

Thanks for sharing that. Perhaps it rankles that RMS has earned himself a place in the history books as a great benefactor of society, while your snarky Slashdot posts have accomplished no such thing?

Re:Grin

[fast turtle]

unlike GCC, Clang/LLVM was designed to ensure the optimizations are the same each and every build. This means you can compile from source and check the md5 sum of your binary against the master md5 and know if the source has been modified before compilation. Critical for signed binaries.

Another benefit is the support for older hardware that's been dropped by the GCC team along with ease of debugging. I've had compiler optimizations introduce unexpected bugs/failure mode in the Linux kernel itself that disappeared when the No Optimization flag was set. Simply put, if the kernel isn't stable, I don't give a damn how stable the rest of your system is, it's not stable because you can't trust the kernel and that's why Clang/LLVM is all about.

Re:Grin

[RR]

...prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software

Sounds similar to arguments against a stable driver interface for the Linux kernel.

That one was for a different reason. Linus is a "pragmatist," and he doesn't believe in Stallman's quest to turn all software into free software.

Stallman wanted to prevent people from using GCC with a non-free optimizer or whatever, because he didn't want people to depend on that non-free optimizer to make a practical system.

Linus wants to retain his own freedom to modify the parts of the kernel that he plays with the most. Linux already has a stable userspace ABI, but a stable kernel ABI means committing to a particular behavior forever. Preventing non-free kernel modules is just gravy on top, because non-free modules lead to crashes that are impossible to fix. That's why adding a non-free module immediately turns the kernel into a Tainted kernel.

Re:Grin

[fatphil]

> I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.

Bollocks.

RMS, and the GPL, do not force you to give your software away, they're perfectly compatible with selling your software for real money.

I hope you enjoyed burning your straw man.

Re:Grin

[fm6]

You obviously have different priorities than previous repliers who complain about GCC licensing. Is licensing at all an issue for you?

Re:Grin

[ckaminski]

Everyone seems to forget that the GPL wasn't created for DEVELOPER freedom, but for end-user freedom.

Dummies. :-P

Re:Grin

[gr8_phk]

With BSD software, not only are you giving away the source code, but you are giving it away with even fewer restrictions than with GPL.

Yeah, but someone who forks it may not offer source to other people. Now you've got a fork out there that offers less freedom than the original. You can argue that "the original is still there" but that's an assumption - presumably a closed source commercial version might become more polished and more popular. Perhaps the original maintainer dies (oh wait, that is a certainty) and the only one actually distributing it is the commercial version that doesn't come with source. GPL protects the freedom of all users of the software, not just subsequent developers. And don't get confused, it's not the BSD license that offers source to subsequent users of a fork - it's the developers of the fork that often do that, but they don't have to.

The freedom to deny someone the same freedom that you enjoy is... odd.

Re:Grin

[mattack2]

But if someone can just compile your software, why are they going to pay for it?

(No, not pay for SUPPORT.. Pay for the software itself.)

Re:Grin

[smash]

but a stable kernel ABI means committing to a particular behavior forever

No... it means you commit to making an interface available for as long as it is supported.

Windows, OS X, BSD, etc have gone through different ABIs. This is the sort of change major version numbers are for - not simply version number inflation because the maintainer is bored with major version 2, etc.

Re:Grin

[Pseudonym]

For those who don't have an emotional investment in the GPL vs BSD pissing contest, it's good that we have two free compilers which are good enough to compile a kernel. GCC has different design goals (e.g. multiple front-ends), but still, the competition is good for it.

Re:Grin

[caseih]

Common misconceptions at best, blatant lies and FUD at worse. Sounds like you don't understand the GPL or copyright law. If the code isn't yours you don't have any freedom at all to build a business model around it. Period. Except as granted by a license, including the GPL.

What you are basically complaining about is that you can't take (steel) someone else's code and sell it when it's GPL, but you can with the BSD.

If I own the copyright on my own code, I can release it under the GPL *and* sell it as a proprietary, closed-source, product. So really from a business point of view the GPL is the best license to choose. It lets your code have a life of its own, and a community, but you can still sell a proprietary product on the code if you wish. You can license the code however you want since it's yours.

Seems like most people's gripe with the GPL comes from the fact that they aren't free to do anything they want with it just because it was freely downloaded. If you don't like the GPL, write your own code. simple as that.

Re:Grin

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he wants to take other people's software and use it without permission in his product. That's why he doesn't like GPL. And that's why his opinion is of zero value.

Re:Grin

[Dasuraga]

Have extremely bad documentation, making it more or less impossible to compile it yourself (this is what a lot of business GPL sofrware does).

Re:Grin

[LingNoi]

Next step would be to replace the GNU tool chain in Linux so we can end the pathetic GNU/Linux thing forever.

Re:Grin

[LingNoi]

Loads of people have figured this out. MySQL for example has a community and enterprise edition. Id Software just released the BFG edition of Doom 3 along with open sourcing the code, you still need to pay for the game to get the game assets.

Re:Grin

[devent]

That is not RMS policy at all. When did he says that you should bundle hardware and software, and give the software away (for free I assume you are implying)?

RMS says that a user should have the three freedoms: 1. to have access to the code, 2. to modify the code and 3. to re-distribute the modified code. Never did he stated that you should give away your code for free.

I would think it would not matter at all if you license your CAD software under the GPL. No of your users can modify and re-distribute your CAD software anyway so what does it matter. There will be no competition, because nobody have the know-how of your code.

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

But you're not forced to give all of it away, as you effectively are with the GPL.

Utterly false.

You can license just part of your own code as GPL and release as much or as little as you want.

You even still retain complete control of your code that you have previously released as GPL, so you can then take it and change it or use it in your closed software, or license it out for a price to someone, or release it as BSD.

Yeah, but this right is denied downstream, ironically under the very copyleft clauses that claim to preserve the 'software freedom'.

The BSD model has proven that you don't need to twist peoples arms

GPL is not twisting anybody's arm. I challenge you to find a single example of a GPL project which has engaged in predatory patent trolling, deliberate compatibility breakage to harm competition, or format or protocol obfuscation to lock in customers. Things which some closed software companies engage in regularly is completely against the nature of open source development, but also open source makes it pretty hard for any of those techniques to be effective.

Not saying it would never happen, but there is nothing about the GPL license that twists anybody's arm.

Oh, you meant "you twisted my arm" as-in, "I want to use your code that you own the rights to, but under the terms I set. Waaahhh.". In that case, fuck you, that's copyright infringement and have fun destroying people's livelihood, hypocrite.

It's not an issue of mere taking the code and changing the terms - let's say I took something that the GP had written and modified it, and then distribute the modified version, that's where the differences start. With GPL, I'm forced to release the source code of my modifications. With BSD, I don't have to - only the original BSD source code has to be given, but I still have the option of keeping the source code of my modifications to myself, even while distributing.

GPL... Among many freedoms it takes away

Stopped reading there. You're either a massive troll or a clueless friggin nincompoop.

Read the 4 freedoms on the home page of the FSF. GPL violates every one of them.

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

This then gets back to the old argument of whose freedom is more important - that of the developers, or the software?

Let's say someone takes an open source software, adds a few of his own modifications to it that include more polish and functionality, and releases it. He wishes to sell it and restrict downstream redistribution, which is essential if he is to succeed in selling the software. With the original software - either under BSD or under GPL, he can't. However, the moment he adds in his modifications, he has the right to change the license to the whole package, as long as he retains the credits of the original authors of the original software. Let's say he puts it under a new license where he provides both binaries and source code to paying customers, but forbids them from redistribution.

In this way, his business interests are protected, since the only people who can get his software are those who buy it from him. At the same time, he promotes open source in that if any of his customers have problems w/ his software and happen to have software engineers on their payroll, they can go through the software itself and tweak it for their own internal uses. As a result, the licensee of the software has what he needs, and is protected even if his vendor goes tits up.

With GPL software, a vendor who writes a modification of the software is forced to make his modification GPL as well - something he isn't forced to under BSD. Which is a big difference

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

Responding to 2 of the above responses to the parent:

Hu? Let say you release a part of your software under GPL and "draw a line" for the rest, I'm entitled to ask you to release the whole thing under GPL, unless you're able to prove that the part you put on the other side of the line is not a derivative work of GPL'd part.

Only if you wrote part of it. If I write a program and release half of it under the GPL, the only person who can sue me over it is me.

The GPL is only an issue if you want to steal other people's code. It doesn't force you to do anything with code you write, unless you mix it with code you didn't write and don't have a license to use (other than the GPL).

That's a non-sequitur to what the parent had written. What he is pointing out is that if you had written a GPLed program, and he added his own part but did not want to release the source code to his modifications - under GPL, which the combined license would have to be under, he couldn't. That's not a problem in BSDL - there, since it is not a CopyLeft license, he could take that software, add his modifications and sell only the binaries. Or, if he wished, put it under a new license (so long as he preserved your credits there) that would provide the source code to paying customers, but prevent any downstream redistribution.

Let say you release a part of your software under GPL and "draw a line" for the rest, I'm entitled to ask you to release the whole thing under GPL, unless you're able to prove that the part you put on the other side of the line is not a derivative work of GPL'd part. In other word, you cannot release half of a software as GPL.

You can ask me to release the source code. But there is a problem: if everything we are talking about was completely made by me, then I own the rights to it. It doesn't matter whether I create new versions of it and don't publish the source code to them: it is my code. GPL applies to people who don't own the copyright to the work (that is you and everyone else in this case). So you can ask until you are blue in the face and I may ignore you as it suits me. Nothing personal to it, mind you.

Of course, if I try to close my version of someone else's source code which is licensed under the GPL, then you would be entitled to obtain it from me if you bought a copy of my binaries... and I should comply.

If you took someone elses GPLed code, added to it some features of your own, then that automatically becomes GPLed if combined w/ that program. That's why people term GPL as viral. So in the above example, let's say you took the GP's code, added your own stuff to it, and then while redistributing it, chose to only redistribute source code to the work from which you started. Guess what - you can't - you'd have to release everything - what he wrote, and what you wrote. That's the thing about CopyLeft.

With BSD licensed code, or its variants, you are under no such restriction. Only thing you have to do there is preserve credits of the original authors.

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.

Richard Stallman's model says such thing. It says "if you want to save costs by using this source code then you must make your changes available to whoever uses it."

Actually, he says nothing about costs. His whole jihad is about the liberation of software, which he euphamistically calls 'Software Freedom'. If you think I'm smearing him, read his essay 'Why software should not have owners'. That's way beyond talking about whether source code should always accompany binaries or not.

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

No. His company wrote the software - it was CAD software, so usually, it would be pretty expensive to start with. So the last thing they can afford is redistribution. They probably wouldn't mind giving the source code as well, if the license allowed them to prevent redistribution or resale. While both GPL and BSDL allow redistribution, only GPL is copyleft, BSDL ain't. As a result, under BSDL, they could modify the license to prevent downstream redistribution while allowing the source code to accompany the binaries all the time. Under GPL, no way!

Re:Grin

[fatphil]

That is a question that applies at least as much to BSD/NCSA-licensed software such as Clang/LLVM as to GPL-licensed software such as GCC.

And one that has been answered many times by the businesses that do release their software under the GPL, BSD, and other licenses that permit redistribution.

Re:Grin

[unixisc]

Actually, GNU has 4 freedoms - the right to run it for any reason, the right to study it (for which source code is needed), the right to help your neighbor by redistributing it, and the right to improve AND RELEASE the improvements to the community. The first 2 freedoms are not as problematic, but the third one is actually the anti-business clause of GNU, while in the 4th one, the second part of it - releasing the improvements - is a continuation of that same anti-business clause. That's the reason companies treat the GPL as radioactive.

Re:Grin

[cabraverde]

Not only is the poor design true, it was very intentional. This is why we need the LLVM project. KDevelop and such shouldn't have to write their own compiler front ends to get feature parity with Visual Studio; but right now they do.

I suspect that he's making retrospective excuses for poor design; I doubt it's as intentional as he claims. A GPL'd shared library would give the idealogical results he appears to want. (Which I support, incidentally)

Re:Grin

[robmyers]

And also at odds with reality. rms certainly says you can charge for software...

Re:Grin

[Paul Jakma]

Yes, correct, it prevents the distribution of. Private modifications are fine either way.

Re:Grin

[Paul Jakma]

No. If I'm the author of software, I can decide to GPL some of it and keep other parts proprietary. I own it, I can do this. No one else can do this however.

The copyright holder of the code is exempt from the GPL. They have no need for a licence via the GPL, because they own it - anything they do with it is legal, at least under copyright law. Copyright only constrains *others*.

Re:Grin

[arglebargle_xiv]

Also, although I've heard a lot about the inner workings of GCC being rather intertwined and convoluted, whereas LLVM is simpler to work with and modify (not sure how true this is).

The internals of gcc are an absolute nightmare, even gcc's own developers admit this. A side-effect of this is that gcc is difficult to maintain, rather buggy, and any changes create a serious risk of introducing further bugs. In terms of code generation, I help maintain a sizeable OSS cross-platform codebase, and gcc alone has more compiler bugs than all other compilers it's built with combined. We've got so many "this silly-walk of code is necessary because without it gcc generates invalid code" conditional compile sections in our code it's not funny, and every new release of gcc brings about further kludges to get around bugs in the code generator. The sooner we can get away from everything using gcc as the default compiler the better.

Re:Grin

[the_arrow]

But if someone can just compile your software, why are they going to pay for it?

Well, a company selling a GPL'd program don't have to give the source to anyone who ask, only the people/companies it distributes it to. So you can't compile it since you don't have it unless you pay for it.

Re:Grin

[arglebargle_xiv]

Another benefit is the support for older hardware that's been dropped by the GCC team along with ease of debugging. I've had compiler optimizations introduce unexpected bugs/failure mode in the Linux kernel itself that disappeared when the No Optimization flag was set. Simply put, if the kernel isn't stable, I don't give a damn how stable the rest of your system is, it's not stable because you can't trust the kernel and that's why Clang/LLVM is all about.

That's exactly the point I was making in this post earlier on in the discussion. Unless you've got the ability to run massive amounts of regression tests to make sure everything's OK, you can't trust the output of gcc with optimisation enabled. So far we haven't found a single compiler bug with LLVM. In contrast the last gcc compiler bug we had to work around was just over a week ago, a simple pointer assignment where the write went to who-knows-where in memory when optimisation was enabled.

Re:Grin

[gr8_phk]

No, he wants to take other people's software and use it without permission in his product. That's why he doesn't like GPL. And that's why his opinion is of zero value.

No, he's willing to get permission. He wants to use it without compensation or obligation. There are plenty of words with negative connotations to describe a person who desires that. People who release their code under GPL just don't want their work used by those folks.

Re:Grin

[Nako]

best comment ever

Re:Grin

[mattack2]

Well, a company selling a GPL'd program don't have to give the source to anyone who ask, only the people/companies it distributes it to. So you can't compile it since you don't have it unless you pay for it.

Can't the people/companies it distributes it to legally give the source out too? That doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent?

Also, even if this is true, this would seem to only apply to programs that they wrote IN THEIR ENTIRETY. If they did that, why would they GPL it if they were also trying to limit source distribution to people/companies it distributes to? Why not just license the proprietary source to their licensees the same way?

Re:Grin

[Tough Love]

I have a problem with Stallman's (aka RMS) model, which says charge for hardware and give the software with source away for free.

Richard Stallman's model says such thing. It says "if you want to save costs by using this source code then you must make your changes available to whoever uses it."

Actually, he says nothing about costs. His whole jihad is about the liberation of software, which he euphamistically calls 'Software Freedom'. If you think I'm smearing him, read his essay 'Why software should not have owners'. That's way beyond talking about whether source code should always accompany binaries or not.

Did you actually read it yourself, or just the title? He says: "What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens—for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate." By gosh, he's right. That's the thing about RMS, if you actually bother to read what he writes it's nearly always impeccably logical. Notice, nothing in that essay about "charge for the hardware, give away the software". You're putting words in his mouth, and by the way, hyperbole like "jihad" does your argument no good at all. He says "should be free" and argues the point well. And he has proved his point, by giving the world GCC and many other valuable tools that made the world a better place. He did not say that you should not earn a living or sell proprietary software. He says software should be free, and he is right. Just like food should be inexpensive and nutritious, not that it always is. And sometimes there are perfectly valid reasons for that.

Re:Grin

[smash]

If I take BSD licensed code and incorporate it into my commercial product, and don't release the source, it is NOT stealing. It is totally within the requirements of the license. The BSD folk want (and this is what the GPL peeps DON'T get) ANY project to have a library of well tested, standards compliant code available for use as the project author sees fit. We DON'T want to force people to reinvent the wheel to circumvent licensing restrictions if they decide they want to build a closed source project (for whatever reason).

Closed source software will always exist - because there are jobs that need to be done that are not fun, require secrecy or whatever. I/BSD project people would MUCH rather that closed source application developers spend their time writing code that doesn't already exist, rather than spending development time and money to write/debug and maintain new code to solve a problem that has already been solved.

Re:Grin

[Paul Jakma]

It's not in the GPL. Again, the copyright holder isn't bound by the GPL. The copyright holder, by definition in law, is or are the person(s) holding the right to dictate the terms by which _others_ may copy the work.

If the the copyright holders say that half the code is available GPL, and the other half isn't, and that that's fine, then that's fine. (They need to word it a bit better than that if they want others to actually be able to distribute under the GPL, in particular they need to state they're granting an exception to the GPL so that others may distribute the GPL half of their software while making use of their proprietary half, but they're the copyright holders, they can do this).

The only time a copyright holder would be constrained is if there were multiple copyright holders and they didn't all agree. However, when the copyright holders agree, they can pretty much do what they want.

Re:Grin

[Zenin]

Both the GPL and BSD license thoroughly prevent anyone from ever "stealing" your code. The difference is not what can happen to your code, but rather what can happen to someone elses code.

BSD doesn't try to dictate what other people do with their work. Whereas the entire reason for the GPL's existence is to limit the freedoms other people have over their own work.

The biggest misconception GPL advocates have is that the GPL exists to protect software creators. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The GPL is entirely constructed to maximize the power of the end users, not the creators.

What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

For now, I'm quite happy with GCC, but could be convinced otherwise with a compelling argument.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Poeli]

The reason FreeBSD switches to clang/LLVM is the license: BSD instead of GPLv3.

You should give clang a try. The LLVM has a much cleaner api then gcc and the error message's are also more readeable. In terms of speed, the difference is shrinking with each release.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[alexgieg]

I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

The actual reason, from what I remember, is licensing. They want to build a fully BSD-licensed OS from the ground up, with zero dependence on GPL-licensed stuff.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[sribe]

I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

Much better modularization, so that the tokenizer used by the compiler is easily available to other tools, so that your editor does not have to (try to) re-implement all the intricacies of C++ syntax, so that parse tree & symbolic info is available to your IDE, so that it does not have to try to re-implement parsing of all the intricacies of C++ templates & namespaces in order to give you cross-referencing or even re-factoring functions (not to mention support for a debugger that can actually figure out types in a complex inheritance hierarchy).

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be bad for us. Clang is in the order of 10 times faster than GCC (compilation speed) and the generated binary is 1% faster than GCC (so essentially the same but saves hours of compile-time per day on 50MB+ C-files).

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Anonymous Coward]

That 1% is case specific. On the benchmarks it is about 10% slower in some specific cases. So bench it first. It is getting better but not across the board...

Also there are non significant amounts of software currently that llvm can not compile. The linux kernel being one of them. This is being fixed, but 'not quite there yet'.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Gerald]

It has a pretty good static analyzer.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[StripedCow]

But the tokenizer and parser for an IDE have to work incrementally (parsing as you type), making them wholly different beasts.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[staalmannen]

You should definitely try compiling something with LLVM/Clang sometime. The error messages that you get are quite nice and stuff normally compiles much faster compared to similar optimization level with GCC. For a source-based distribution like FreeBSD or Gentoo that might be a nice boon. Some developers (the Chromium ones if I am not mistaken) have switched to LLVM/Clang for their development, but they still ship the final binaries built with GCC.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Brian Feldman]

I don't believe that you can make a claim like that if you do not have experience in the incremental parser code of an IDE.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[KiloByte]

Clang is in the order of 10 times faster than GCC (compilation speed) and the generated binary is 1% faster than GCC (so essentially the same but saves hours of compile-time per day on 50MB+ C-files).

Bullshit. It's compilation is at most 1/3 faster, and on most cases I checked, the result executes between 5-25% slower. The former seems to be pretty constant everywhere, the latter strongly depends on the code base in question, with huge outliers both ways.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[gnasher719]

But the tokenizer and parser for an IDE have to work incrementally (parsing as you type), making them wholly different beasts.

No need to work incrementally, as long as you just work _fast_. That's what you have fast processors for, to recompile after every keystroke.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[fnj]

I don't see anybody addressing this question adequately. Here goes for a start.

1) g++ has simply awful error messages for template code. clang++ has MUCH more helpful error messages. Of not quite so much importance, all clang/clang++ error messages are significantly better than those of gcc/g++. Looks like clang++ has spurred g++ to improve error messages in 4.8 though. They NEEDED to be improved.

2) clang++ 3.1 has significantly better C++11 support than g++ 4.7:
      Rvalue refs for *this
      Alignment support
      Strong compare-exchange
      Bidirectional fences
      Atomics in signal handlers
      Also borrows from C99 one very significant enhancement: C99 designated initializers

References:
clang: Expressive Diagnostics
C++0x/C++11 Support in GCC
C++98 and C++11 Support in Clang

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[evilviper]

They want to build a fully BSD-licensed OS from the ground up, with zero dependence on GPL-licensed stuff.

Not really true. Everyone was pretty comfortable living along-side GPLv2-licensed software for many, many years. But NOT the new GPLv3. Organizations all over the place are running away, screaming, from anything using that extra-restrictive and incompatible license. The FSF, developing the GPLv3 license, has done more to promote BSD/MITX licensed software than anyone else could have ever hoped to.

Some companies just keep their older, GPLv2 licensed software as long as they can, but in compilers in particular, age and lack of development is a liability, so they eventually have to go out and look for more liberally licensed projects that will make a reasonable replacement. Hence LLVM has seen a flood of development effort.

Secondly, with the change from gcc-2.x to gcc-3.x and now 4.x, compile times have climbed significantly, in favor of optimization. Even if you turn off all the options you can, you're talking about a substantially longer build time. Not an issue for your final compile for public consumption, but during development, where folks want to quickly compile an test, it's a real nuisance, which numerous develops have been complaining about.

Apple, FreeBSD and many others went for LLVM. OpenBSD went for PCC instead.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Tough Love]

The main advantage of LLVM is that it will provide much needed competition for GCC which for the last decade has only had VCC to spur it on. Note that LLVM code can be freely transplanted into GCC while the reverse is not allowed, probably enough in itself to ensure GCC's continued preeminence even with Apple's fat checkbook backing LLVM.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[steveha]

on most cases I checked, the result [with Clang] executes between 5-25% slower.

I recompiled a large audio processing code base in Clang and the result was about a 2-3% speedup, with no problems. I immediately switched to using Clang for all release builds. (I still use GCC for debug builds.)

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Rockoon]

Another option is to switch from hard drives to SSDs since that handles the bottleneck at its source: time spent seeking to a track.

This guy clearly has no idea what he is talking about.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[UnknownSoldier]

> This guy clearly has no idea what he is talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics#Seek_time

Hard Drives: In HDDs this is typically between 0.2 and 0.8 ms
Typical SSDs will have a seek time between 0.08 and 0.16 ms.

Clearly I have no clue what I'm talking about where SSDs are up to 10 times faster then hard drives.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[bluefoxlucid]

Possibly that it's slow as shit. There are a lot of single and multi string functions to test things. An incremental parser would be better closer to brute force or maybe read and partial hash, something that does a lot of work pretty much but it's quick work. It may be 40 times slower than a reverse, indexed search like Boyer-moore, but it's still like 20 microseconds so who gives a shit?

Then again, 40 times slower when performing a bulk job means a 5 minute job is a 3 hour 20 minute job. Works for clicky-clicky-clicky on the keyboard where you can tap 10 or 12 keys per second, not so great when you're bulk processing and expected to do this thousands of times per second and can only do it hundreds.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[bluefoxlucid]

so like uint8_t a = 255 + 1 could do something really fucking strange, I should be using uint8_t a = (255 + 1) % 256 and it'll optimize out the % because it knows about overflow in my CPU and I basically told it I want that kind of thing to happen?

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[pjr.cc]

Its not necessarily about an advantage of either really.. clang/llvm is really more about modularity and focusing on a more flexible toolchain.

As an example, if you want to compile from c-> binary in linux, theres quite a command path depth to it (i.e. multiple processes take place in serial to eventually produce a binary). The problem with gcc is that the code has become messy and its modular approach doesnt really help when it comes to adding a new language or a new target (i.e. F# perhaps, or ARM as a target). It also carries alot of legacy cruft with it that has been there since the dawn of time.

Ultimately when you do want to add a new language or target, you almost end up re-writing the entire gcc stack which is quite painful.

clang/llvm is really about getting rid of that pain with a more modular approach so if you want to add a language or a target, you just focus on your goal not the entire toolchain. As a Plus, its also gotten rid of some of the antique cruft which is at least part of the reason its often faster. IMHO - its faster in some situations, but not all.

None of this really matters much to the end user (except perhaps the speed bit)... What does matter (and what you will care about) is as clang/llvm matures you'll find developers more likely to target clang/llvm for compiler toolchains with new languages or targets.

The other thing you might care about as well is that its better with errors, they are alot clearer and more useful and for that see http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html however, that only extends to clang really.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[beelsebob]

I don't believe that you can make a claim like that if you've not used Xcode, which syntax highlights, compiles, and on-the-fly checks, all with the same parser (clang's).

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[aristotle-dude]

I know of LLVM, but haven't used it, and it really seems like very few hardcore Linux/OSS devs have a clue about it. Is there really a clear advantage, or is it just an excuse to write a new compiler to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

For now, I'm quite happy with GCC, but could be convinced otherwise with a compelling argument.

The clear advantage is illustrated by fast turtle. Here http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3237175&cid=41911001 where you can validate that a binary was created with a specific set of code using the MD5 sum of your binary against the master MD5 or to validate that a third party distributor is releasing the same binary as the official one. You cannot do that with GCC.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[willy_me]

It you are working on source code, chances are it will be cached in memory when you go to compile. The seek times don't have much of an impact assuming your OS does a good job at caching. Now I'm not saying that SSDs aren't great, just that the impact of disk access speed is not as pronounced as you make it sound - at least when compiling the same code multiple times. But when it comes to boot speed, or the time required to compile code that isn't cached, SSDs are amazing.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[shutdown -p now]

Out of curiosity, how good is Xcode syntax highlighting and code completion on C++? Can it handle arbitrarily complex templates?

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[shutdown -p now]

Incremental parsing means that you don't re-lex/re-parse the entire text stream from the beginning every time a character or two get inserted because of user typing something. Which means that you have to have a lexerthat's smart enough to correct just the few affected tokens, and then a parser that looks at those changed tokens and updates only the affected part of the AST. Which, generally speaking, is not at all a trivial thing, especially for a language as complicated as C++ (where a single token change on one line can result in a variable declaration becoming an expression on a line in a different file).

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Rockoon]

Clearly I have no clue what I'm talking about where SSDs are up to 10 times faster then hard drives.

You have no clue what you are talking about because you are claiming that seek times are a significant portion of compile time. I could have called you completely retarded and still got modded up, because you really are completely retarded.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[Tough Love]

The main advantage of LLVM is that it will provide much needed competition for GCC which for the last decade has only had VCC to spur it on. Note that LLVM code can be freely transplanted into GCC while the reverse is not allowed, probably enough in itself to ensure GCC's continued preeminence even with Apple's fat checkbook backing LLVM.

So gcc is to Samsung as LLVM is to Apple? One creates, one copies?

They both create and they both copy, it's called "open source" and that is the way it is supposed to work. Your simile is horrible. Being able to literally copy BSD licensed code into a GPL program is exactly what the BSD guys want, or they would have used the GPL license. Going the other way is exactly what the GPL guys don't want, and you won't hear BSD guys whining about that. Bear in mind that in many cases, it's the same guys, it's not a big war as you seem to hope.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[UnknownSoldier]

The times quoted were: "The other two less commonly referenced seek measurements are track-to-track and full stroke. The track-to-track measurement is the time required to move from one track to an adjacent track. This is the shortest (fastest) possible seek time. In HDDs this is typically between 0.2 and 0.8 ms."

Reading. You might want to try it sometime.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[UnknownSoldier]

> I believe he was referring to your belief that drive seek times are the bottle neck when compiling.
Uh, you might actually want to try _benchmarking_ compile times on a large project sometime. I've worked with enough PS3 developers that switched over to using a Bulk / Build system where their compile times went from 45+ mins to 5+ mins to know that seek time + random read times are FAR slower then one seek + one sequential read. Since the _same_ amount of data is being read in both cases, that leaves seek time as the majority of the bottleneck ON THE SAME SYSTEM.

> using a Mickey Mouse OS like Windows, but the automatic caching in Linux leaves your source files in RAM after the first compile (as long as you've got enough memory).
Agreed that using a better designed OS helps alleviates the weakness of slow hard drives, but sadly the majority of developers are on Windows. :-(

> A dedicated RAM drive would smoke an SSD BTW if seeks times are really holding you back.
Of course it would. That is essentially just a memcpy() (in the best case.) :-)

That is why I originally wrote "Of course there is no magic silver bullet but if you haven't given them a go, try it." and "YMMV."

The other option is to try a distributed build system; one popular software is IncrediBuild and I've seen enough developers again significantly reduce their compile time when a Bulk / Unity build wasn't feasible.

But what do I know; it is far easier to criticize someone and provide no alternatives such as I just did above.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[cheesybagel]

LLVM is more like a JIT engine than a compiler. Clang is the C/C++ compiler frontend that uses LLVM as the backend to generate an executable.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[cheesybagel]

Clang provides lower performance binaries than GCC for my code and other pieces of code I have benchmarked. Sure Clang compiles fast on the equivalent of -O0 and has ANSI colored error messages but that isn't the only criteria I have for a compiler.

Re:What's the clear advantage of LLVM?

[cheesybagel]

CCache helps when compiling large source trees.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely the BSD maintainers and developers out there.... bout thats less then 0.00001% of 7+billion people. I'm going to guess anywhere between 1-1000 =)

Re:Why switch at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never really understood the motivation for switching away from GCC. Please enlighten me.

being bsd people, they don't like the gpl.

Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[tepples]

For one thing, LLVM isn't copylefted, making it available for use as part of non-free software. (There are some major categories of software that for economic reasons cannot be released as free software; I can explain in more detail if you wish.) For another, it's designed to allow just-in-time compilation of bytecode, such as what might be seen in a Flash, Java, .NET, or JavaScript VM, in addition to standard ahead-of-time compilation of source code into native code.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[X0563511]

So, written a bit more flexibly, and licensed a bit more flexibly :)

Nothing wrong with having a "competitor" (it isn't, but anyway you get what I am saying) from either perspective. Gives both a reason to strive to improve.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[Millennium]

Could you elaborate on the "economic reasons" certain categories cannot be released as free software?

Also, LLVM isn't actually designed for JIT: some people have managed to make it work, but not without problems. GCC isn't designed for JIT either, of course; it's outside the problem space of both.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes please explain the economic reasons why "some major categories of software ... cannot be released as free software"

Anyone that sells C/C++ code analysis software as a business?

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[lindi]

At least for me "lli" works much more reliably than "lli -force-interpreter" (that disables the JIT).

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, FreeBSD cares about it's permissive license, as such, no GPLv3 software in the base system.

FreeBSD gets a lot of its support and user base from the fact that is can be used to drive the creation of commercial products. The goal of the FreeBSD project is to make good, free software,not to force anyone else to also make free software.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[jedidiah]

> There are some major categories of software that for economic reasons cannot be released as free software

Yet despite of this the world has survived for a rather long time using a Copyleft compiler without the heads of any Robber Barons exploding.

It's kind of on par with GNU finally using it's own kernel after 20 or so years instead of using the Linux kernel. It's interesting but far less significant than some might want to assert. We managed to get along quite well without it.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[pmontra]

These are not exactly the terms of GPL and BSD but:

GPL is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and if somebody else makes it better they must share it with all the world, as I did."

BSD is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and I accept the loss that somebody else makes it better and keep it for themselves because I want to have the option of getting somebody's else software, make it better and keep it for me without sharing it back."

I think we can argue forever on the ethic merits of the two approaches (I feel in the GPL camp). Anyway both GPL and BSD make economic sense and we won't be talking about them if they didn't, one or both would be dead long time ago. If a company wants to include some big secret in its code, it must go BSD and occasionally regrets it can't use some GPL code and rant about it. Sometimes the GPL people rant about not being able to include BSD code in their projects.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[TheRaven64]

For example, we wouldn't have an Objective C compiler if NeXT hadn't been forced to release it in order to comply with the GPL.

Speaking as the person who wrote and maintains the GNUstep libobjc and the clang support for it: Bullshit. The GPL forced NeXT to open source half of the implementation (the compiler support, not the runtime), and their implementation was such a pile of crap that it set back GCC's support for a long time. Open source support for Objective-C in clang is so much better than in GCC that it's not even worth comparing the two.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[TheMMaster]

Actually it is much simpler than that;

GPL is designed to protect users' interests
BSD is designed to protect developers' interests

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[gnasher719]

Also, LLVM isn't actually designed for JIT: some people have managed to make it work, but not without problems. GCC isn't designed for JIT either, of course; it's outside the problem space of both.

WTF? Apple's first use of LLVM was as a JIT for OpenGL. When compiling OpenGL to code for various graphics cards became a maintenance nightmare, they used LLVM: OpenGL compiles to the internal representation of LLVM, same code for all graphics cards, and LLVM compiles to code for the graphics card, all at runtime.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[MMC Monster]

Who would put a compiler as part of their software (either FOSS or otherwise)? Unless, of course, your software is another compiler...

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[Millennium]

Apple actually had to stretch some definitions on that project. The actual technique they used is more akin to what the original JVMs did: ahead-of-time compilation that happens to be just before the code is run, but ahead-of-time nonetheless. JIT implies something different, and it's not really in LLVM's problem space.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[snadrus]

By what reasoning? I would have labelled this oppositely:
- With BSD, a good networking stack made it into (earlier versions of) Windows thereby helping user choice.
- With GPL, services companies are the norm which encourage convoluted software that's hard on users.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[SolitaryMan]

GPL is designed to protect users' interests

Exactly! (Freedom to tinker)

BSD is designed to protect developers' interests

This really depends on developer's interest. When releasing the software, developer has way more freedom to choose the software licence, then the user, who buys the software. Therefore, I'd argue that user's freedoms are in more need of a protection.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[thoth]

How about this: imagine a text editor released under both GPL and BSD.

Developer A takes the GPL version, extends it, makes it nicer, etc. but the new file format isn't fully compatible with the original.
Developer B takes the BSD version, extends it, makes it nicer, etc. but the new file format isn't fully compatible with the original.

Which version is the USER better off with, if they need to extract their data in a format they can take somewhere else? The one where the source code changes are available, or the one where they aren't?

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[gomiam]

There is a simpler explanation: BSD is about freedom of the code, GPL is about freedom of the user.

Actually I think you can't have both kinds of freedom at the same time: the freedom to do whatever you want with the code (and its license) allows you to limit the freedom of your users to do the same. This can be considered a minor problem (as BSD does) or a major one (as GPL does).

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[gomiam]

That's not a loss. If someone writes new code, you don't lose anything. You always retain the BSD code. You've just extended the base of people using BSD code, and may well get future contributions back from them.

Yes, you have... as long the new code keeps being BSD.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[HiThere]

I think we disagree about what is best. I've used OS X, and I prefer Linux. I'll admit I've never used Photoshop, but for my purposes the GIMP and Inkscape are quite good, and I've heard other people complaining about various aspects of Photoshop. (Yeah, I've heard them complaining about the GIMP, too.) And I'll admit I don't know about AutoCAD. Supposedly Intel makes the best compilers...if you never intend to compile on and for anything but and Intel chip. If you need the program to run on a competitors chips...expect intentional delays.

Basically, I think you're wrong. And I also don't believe that there's an "absolute standard" of best for a software product. What's best depends on exactly what you're doing.

P.S.: The ONLY aspect in which I've heard MSOffice is superior to OpenOffice or LibreOffice is support for MSBasic. Since I don't use that, I don't count this as a superiority. I do, however, often edit long documents, and MSOffice is reported to crash on those, destroying the original document. So from my perspective MSOffice is decidedly inferior. And that's without considering that it won't run on Linux (my chosen OS) anyway.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[kthreadd]

Why wouldn't the user be able to get the changes for both programs?

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[dgatwood]

GPL is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and if somebody else makes it better they must share it with all the world, as I did."

BSD is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and I accept the loss that somebody else makes it better and keep it for themselves because I want to have the option of getting somebody's else software, make it better and keep it for me without sharing it back."

No, that's a fundamental mischaracterization.

The GPL is for people and companies who think, "I wrote this software, and if anybody else wants to use it, they should have to give back not only any changes they make to this software, but also any software whose functionality depends on this software or portions of this software."

The BSD license is for people and companies who think, "I wrote this software, and I'm willing to accept that some people may use it as part of a proprietary piece of software and may or may not give back changes, confident that most of them will want to give back their changes because doing so reduces their maintenance costs, and thus I will get patches from those proprietary companies whereas with the GPL, they would reimplement the wheel and I'll get nothing."

Sometimes the GPL people rant about not being able to include BSD code in their projects.

Unless it's the ancient four-clause BSD license or its predecessor (with no enumerated clauses), those GPL people are wrong. You can freely include BSD-licensed code in GPLed projects. Just not the other way around.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[kthreadd]

GPL -> User has access to source code so (in theory) has less risk of vendor lock-in. BSD -> Developers can create lockin

Well, it depends. Here on my FreeBSD system I have the source code to the entire operating system under /usr/src, it is included with the installer and can be installed during installation. Companies like Apple can use it to improve their products, and sometimes they contribute back even if all their products aren't open. However that doesn't make /usr/src go away.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[flimflammer]

So basically it's not different from what he wrote.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[pmontra]

Probably it's only me that is wrong, thank you for pointing out my mistake. As for my oversimplifications, I knew I was leaving out something but I wanted to keep it short. Your interpretations are closer to the real licenses.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[aristotle-dude]

How about this: imagine a text editor released under both GPL and BSD.

Developer A takes the GPL version, extends it, makes it nicer, etc. but the new file format isn't fully compatible with the original. Developer B takes the BSD version, extends it, makes it nicer, etc. but the new file format isn't fully compatible with the original.

Which version is the USER better off with, if they need to extract their data in a format they can take somewhere else? The one where the source code changes are available, or the one where they aren't?

Neither? While a developer can be a user, not all users are developers. Availability of the code means squat to someone who does not know how to write code. That is the problem with the GNU people. They assume that everyone is an interested third party capable of understanding and modifying code.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[v1z]

While a developer can be a user, not all users are developers. Availability of the code means squat to someone who does not know how to write code.

That's ridiculous. If you have the code, you can *hire* someone to fix the thing, ten years after the original supplier went bankrupt or whatever.

I need the plans for my house, even if I'm not licensed to fix the bathroom -- I need them in case I hire someone to do improvements here.

Most every place I've been paid to work with software, the ones with budgetary responsibility have *not* been able to code themselves out of a wet paper bag. They've been readily able to get something fixed, if the source is available -- if needed by hiring someone to do it.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[aristotle-dude]

While a developer can be a user, not all users are developers. Availability of the code means squat to someone who does not know how to write code.

That's ridiculous. If you have the code, you can *hire* someone to fix the thing, ten years after the original supplier went bankrupt or whatever.

I need the plans for my house, even if I'm not licensed to fix the bathroom -- I need them in case I hire someone to do improvements here.

Most every place I've been paid to work with software, the ones with budgetary responsibility have *not* been able to code themselves out of a wet paper bag. They've been readily able to get something fixed, if the source is available -- if needed by hiring someone to do it.

No, what you suggest is ridiculous. If the software is "free" to begin with, why would I want to spend a lot of money to hire something that nobody is going to bother to maintain? That would be throwing good money after bad. You are better off looking for an alternative and choosing a product in the first place that has adequate export facilities for your data should you decide to migrate to another system later.

You appear to be ignorant of how much software development costs to suggest that someone "hire" a programmer to maintain an abandoned product.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[aristotle-dude]

If not for the developers, what is the point of open source?

If not for the users, what is the point of software? If you insist on treating users as if they were developers then you will quickly lose them and destroy the relevance of your software. Software without users is nothing.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[devent]

For "economic reasons" it cannot be free software (open source you mean?) What a BS.
The same goes for a dictatorship: for "economic reasons" we cannot allow you basic human rights.

You live in a democracy with human and civil rights I assume? Why do you make apologies to restrict my freedom? I assume it's your "economic reasons" that you deny me my rights, meaning your wallet.

There are no "economic reasons" to not make a software open source. I assume you know the difference between free (as in beer) and open source software and that you are free to charge whatever price you want, even for GPL software?
See Redhat, they make enough money out of completely free software. Last time I checked their profits increased and they broke one record after another.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[icebraining]

GPL doesn't force anyone to give back code, though. It's strictly a pay-it-forward system. "Help others as I've helped you".

And expecting people to do the right thing is wonderful, but we're not just dealing with people, we're often dealing with corporations.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[Pav]

What are you smoking? People develop inhouse code all the time... I've worked for two, no three organisations that have done this, and these weren't tech companies either. Closed ex-BSD software is useless in that context. You might enjoy playing "prisoners delema", but if people want my code it's GPLed.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[aristotle-dude]

What are you smoking? People develop inhouse code all the time... I've worked for two, no three organisations that have done this, and these weren't tech companies either. Closed ex-BSD software is useless in that context. You might enjoy playing "prisoners delema", but if people want my code it's GPLed.

I don't smoke and I have been working on inhouse development for over 13 years. Of course someone else's closed source code is useless to me if they will not license it to me but so is GPL'ed code because of its viral nature. While my employer might use software to sell it as a service, they might want to be able to sell a non-hosted version of the software without having to worry about distributing the source with it or contributing back to a community. Because of this, the only code that I would ever borrow would be public domain code or BSD licensed code.

You are contradicting yourself. You speak of inhouse development and yet you think that BSD licensed code is bad when the opposite is true for inhouse development. BSD allows the company to resell their software without having to publish their entire codebase that was linked to the shared code.

The GPL is not compatible with inhouse development for companies that sell software as a service because it can expose all of your trade secrets and business model to your competitors.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[HiThere]

Well, I haven't used the programs I don't like in a long time. This is a surprise? (I have used Photoshop. Just not in a long time, so I don't consider myself qualified to comment on it as if I were a user. Others don't seem to have the same scruples.)

And a part of my criterion for "a good program" is that it runs well on the system that I'm using. So for many of these I don't need to try them to know that it fails on at least some criteria. I also have criteria as to what terms I will accept in an EULA. If the software doesn't meet those, then I consider it unusably lousy software. Perhaps you don't care about legal requirements.

Seriously, different people have different standards about what is good software. The ggp claimed that all FOSS software was inferior (as an absolute statement, with no consideration that other people might have other ranking styles). I was responding in, I believe, a quite moderate fashion to that piece of absolute bladerdash.

Re:Not GPL, and suitable for JIT

[smash]

For fucks sake. The BSD license does not consider it to be "stealing". Using BSD in your closed source project is ENCOURAGED.

Re:Why switch at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clang have a really nice error/warning output, so it's easier to debug your code (try to install clang on your distribution and compile some programs, its really pretty and useful).

But the motivation to switch on FreeBSD is mainly another one: LLVM is licensed on BSD license, while GCC uses GPLv3. Since FreeBSD uses BSD too, the use of LLVM make it easier to bundle compiler binaries with the distribution.

Re:WOW

[ByOhTek]

and the FreeBSD users, we bring it to a bit larger number than that. Probably still only 10s of thousands...

Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

FreeBSD might not be anywhere near as popular as linux but its a damn good system, and whats more there arn't endless ever-so-slightly incompatable distributions of it. Ok, its never going to threaten Linux but its good to have a proper alternative free Unix system available that is actually interested in its end users and isn't just a pet project of the devs (unlike certain other BSDs I could mention).

Re:Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

"Your FUD about distros "

FUD is it? Tell me why then virtually every distro needs its own specific package for certain software? Wouldn't be anything to do with them all having different library versions would it? No , couldn't possibly be that....

Re:Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

"The FUD is behaving as if FreeBSD is somehow better than {entire set of Linux distros}."

I never said it was. Why don't you don't take your own advice and YOU try reading what *I* wrote.

Since when does saying that FreeBSD is a good system mean that I'm having a pop at linux? And there ARE lots of slightly incompatable distributions of linux whether you like it or not. So I don't see what your issue is.

Re:Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

"Don't try that smartass, clever, internet-arguing shit with me."

I'm so sorry if you're incapable of coming up with a suitable response. I'll write it all in single syllable words in capitals just for you next time so you have a better chance.

"Don't try to feign being offended that I'm misrepresenting you. I'm not. Don't try that shit on, nobody else is reading this anymore except you and me, and we both know full well what the deal is."

Only in your mind sonny. All I implied was thats its better to have a single platform than lots of slightly different ones. Thats not the same as saying any one distribution is shit. Perhaps that concept is too complex for you to grok, but unfortunately it seems you're just another knee jerk fanboi who can't handle even the slightest debate about whatever it is that you've nailed your ego and self worth too. You're all the same type of psychotic nutjobs.

Re:Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

"Wahhh waahhhh. You got called out on your bullcrap,"

Oh dear, are we're really down to the teenage debating level already? Do yourself a favour and grow up. And I guess you can't read either since all you did was spout rubbish about what you thought I was implying.

"{Linux distro} is vastly more popular than all the free BSDs combined, and its a damn good system,"

Care to point out where I said otherwise? No, did't think so.

"arn't endless majorly-incompatable variants of it."

Distros tend to have incomtabilities with each other and even with previous version of the same distro. True or false? Its a simple answer, see if you can manage it though if you really want to come out with another juvenile attempt at diverting attention feel free. As you said, its only the 2 of us reading this now so you're not fooling anyone other than perhaps yourself.

Re:Don't knock it until you've tried it

[Viol8]

"I'll call you The Fudmeister from now on."

*guffaw* Did you think that up all by yourself or did your little sister help you?

"FreeBSD tends to have incomtabilities with other BSDs and even with previous version of FreeBSD. True or false? "

Answering a question with a question is the desperate last resort for the defeated. Thanks for playing.

Re:Is time for a big FreeBsd celebration

[Provocateur]

Actually, 9 of them did. One of them had to be the designated driver. He had a car, you know.

Genres of non-free software

[tepples]

Could you elaborate on the "economic reasons" certain categories cannot be released as free software?

Certainly. I've started on this essay.

Re:Genres of non-free software

[emj]

None of these, games, DRM crippled video players, tax software need to be proprietary. You even mention why: what would these software packages be without their WAD files, tax definition files and encryption keys.

Re:Why switch at all?

[Cinder6]

Could check this article: http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html

Apple made the switch a while back in Xcode. The end result was much better debugging and refactoring capabilities.

Having a strong competitor to GCC

[stox]

will drive GCC to a far greater degree than without a competitor. This is good for all involved.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[arendjr]

If both were proprietary software, I'd agree, but given they're open-source, I don't think so.

GCC is an open-source project. How are they going to hire extra developers to keep the edge over LLVM? And to what end? Once LLVM takes over the crown I believe it makes more sense for a lot of GCC developers to just continue their work on LLVM instead, and GCC will shrink to irrelevance. But it's still good for all involved, as everybody gets a better compiler :)

(And yes, I know, this might not happen for a long time, and GCC supports many more languages than LLVM, but I do think over time LLVM will become more dominant...)

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[tuppe666]

No its just good for your agenda, although the heavy involvement of Apple without the support of a tit-for-tat license is going to major offputting for many developers. The irony of FreeBSD switching to Clang/LLVM is not lost on me. Personally the thought of a two-level development of a browser quite disturbing.

The reality is GCC still moves forward, and Clang/LLVM has a long way to catch up, perhaps if develops stopped developing Clang/LLVM for that everyone would again getter a btter browser, and everyone would be on an equal playing field. ;)

but like I say I prefer a world where some do not get a better browser than others :(

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[lister king of smeg]

or GCC will simply grab the better code and GPL it leaving it with another lesser competator

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Microlith]

How are they going to hire extra developers to keep the edge over LLVM?

How have they gotten this far? It's not like GCC is struggling to keep pace in development.

Once LLVM takes over the crown I believe it makes more sense for a lot of GCC developers to just continue their work on LLVM instead, and GCC will shrink to irrelevance.

Why would a GCC developer move to LLVM? Do you believe that all of the developers on the project are so opportunistic that they would simply jump to a different compiler? I suspect more than a few are also GPL supporters.

But it's still good for all involved, as everybody gets a better compiler :)

Well, better for some people. I suspect that the first fallout of any industry shift to LLVM will be that the public compiler will be significantly lacking in optimizations while the expensive, proprietary versions will have all the good optimizations.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[arendjr]

My agenda has no stake in this debate other than me wanting to have a good open-source C++ compiler available.

Why your mumbling about browsers is beyond me, but maybe I'm the one missing something...

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the first fallout of any industry shift to LLVM will be that the public compiler will be significantly lacking in optimizations while the expensive, proprietary versions will have all the good optimizations.

So GPL supporters are spreading FUD now? Bravo, guys, bravo!

Firstly, by "any industry shift to LLVM", do you mean something like, say, XCode using LLVM+CLang as the default compiler for all projects?

And secondly, what "expensive, proprietary version"? This does not exist - you have invented it, for the purpose of anti-BSD rhetoric. This is a paranoid possibility in your Stallman-dizzied head, not an actual fork. Apple, for instance, roll all the LLVM+CLang fixes back into mainline. Even though they don't have to. Look, people can act morally without religion!

It's not like GCC is struggling to keep pace in development.

And thirdly, the reason Apple moved to LLVM is because it has a better optimizer than GCC. It produces better code. Those of us who struggled with gcc 3.x for years waiting for them to put in some even vaguely modern compiler construction techniques are having a good old laugh at the idea that GCC doesn't struggle to keep pace. And we are never - never - going back to GCC, when we can avoid doing so.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[serviscope_minor]

Well, better for some people. I suspect that the first fallout of any industry shift to LLVM will be that the public compiler will be significantly lacking in optimizations while the expensive, proprietary versions will have all the good optimizations.

Not just that.

I remember the bad old days where every venduh and his dog had their own "extra proprietary super awseome dongle controlled extra awesome super cool" compiler.

Vendors of hardware *LOVE* proprietary compilers. And by love, I mean love to break in mysterious and subtle ways.

Once gcc took off in the embedded world, life got a lot better since many of the cheaper vendors would just use as close to stock gcc as possible (though usually with a little bit of extra internal compiler errors added), rather than some extra super proprietary extra messed up version.

This isn't a business issue. There is no sane business case for taking a commercial compiler front end and a commercial compiler back end, filling it with extra bugs and shipping it. But hardware vendors love to believe that they have an awesome proprietary advantage in software for some reason. Even though they sell hardware. They don't, of course. I'd just say "whatever" except that turns rapidly into invective if one is forced to use their "tools".

Once GCC came along, they believed that they no longer had such an advantage (presumably) so they stopped introducing their extra proprietary bugs into compilers, and limited themselves to a few extra miscellaneous bugs. But it was still mostly gcc and still mostly worked.

If LLVM comes to dominate, the hardware vendors will jump right back on that attitude and make the life of the humble developer hell again.

This isn't a religious, or philosophical issue. It's a "hardware vendors are mental" issue.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[arendjr]

Well, it seems to me the major forces driving the development of a compiler are the chip manufacturers and the developers of operating system. Both have an intrinsic desire to have a good compiler available to them. But what vested interest do they have that this compiler be GCC? If at some point in the future LLVM were to be become the one generating the most efficient code, and if the LLVM codebase is the more maintainable one, then why not switch?

And both chip manufacturers and OS developers seem to have a common goal of making their optimizations available to as many developers as possible. It does not seem to be in their interest to make their optimized versions prioprietary. After all, the compiler is not their money maker, it's simply a prerequisite of getting developers to support their OS or CPU in the first place!

You're right any GPL purists will likely stick to GCC, but personally I doubt they make up the majority of the GCC community.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Microlith]

XCode using LLVM+CLang as the default compiler for all projects?

That's hardly an industry shift and you know it.

And secondly, what "expensive, proprietary version"? This does not exist - you have invented it, for the purpose of anti-BSD rhetoric.

So we're going to ignore all of the proprietary, seat-licensed compilers out there?

This is a paranoid possibility in your Stallman-dizzied head, not an actual fork.

Quick! Into the name-calling and ad-hominem!

Apple, for instance, roll all the LLVM+CLang fixes back into mainline.

Do they? Unless you're on their compiler team you can't possibly know this.

I believe the phrase "you mad" applies very, very well to your spittle-flecked rant here.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[bill_mcgonigle]

how are they going to hire extra developers to keep the edge over LLVM?

that's the beauty of open source - LLVM devs are GCC's extra devs.

They'll do experiments, try different techniques, and generally waste all sorts of time chasing dead ends that the gcc folks won't have to do. When the LLVM folks find a winner that's also applicable to the gcc model, all the gcc devs have to do is implement it. Their natural human drive for improvement, challenge, and excellence will compel them to compete.

And the same goes for gcc devs chasing their experiments and the LLVM folks learning from it. Compiler techniques are still new and evolving so there's still much to be learned and the leading edge is always new and experimental so there's lots of room for both to improve. Rising tides will lift all boats.

Fortunately there's no Berne-convention style automatic patents on ideas so they can freely float back and forth without license problems, even if the code is encumbered by copyright.

PS the comments below will now point out that the two compilers use different sorts of backends and that advances in one won't necessarily be applicable to the other and that 'just implementing it' is a hard problem. Thank you, guys.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[jandrese]

It's not that easy. gcc's issues are structural and intentional. It simply cannot provide the features that LLVM users are excited about, like proper IDE integration so you can finally get a real Visual Studio competitor on Linux.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[tyrione]

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Cray and more are all moving to LLVM/Clang by default.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[tyrione]

You're completely wrong with LLVM domination provides a gateway for Vendors to break stuff. The very manifesto of LLVM/Clang is being tested right now with Intel wanting to dump their Cilk Plus Extension into the source and getting major backlash from the core developers who refuse to put it in as it breaks with the intended foundations of LLVM/Clang. These are just a couple of the more kind remarks from Google and Apple where others are more sardonic regards to maintenance and impacting on the modularity and extendability of code maintenance this would impose and like with OpenCL Intel is discovering it has to play according to the rules everyone else in the Open Source Community play in LLVM/Clang or go home:

Chandler Caruth writes: `` Before we go too far, and certainly before we dive in with patches, there is an important discussion which needs to take place: should Clang grow support for Cilk Plus.

Clang has strongly resisted the urge to grow support for arbitrary vendor extensions to the C/C++ programming languages for several reasons:

• - It aims to be a strictly standards enforcing compiler, something complicated by extensions
• - To minimize maintenance burden, and ensure rapid development of Clang itself
• - To avoid fragmentation, or supporting competing but different (or even opposed) extensions

The current guidelines are that it is healthy for Clang to support an extension when there is a paper in front of the C++ committee which proposes making that extension part of standard C++, there is an active committee member backing that proposed extension, and there are indications of consensus on the direction if not the particulars of the extension as it will be standardized. Furthermore, if the extension is still undergoing significant discussion or is not yet reasonably clear that it will be a part of the upcoming standard, we really want an active, trusted member of the Clang community to be backing the implementation so that we have confidence in it getting updated to match the progress of the proposal to the committee.

The goal here is to balance the desire to foster implementation experience with extensions to the language prior to standardization while minimizing the cost on the project and community and maximizing the quality bar of the primary Clang code base and released binaries[1][2].''

Douglas Gregor extended the comments: `` This last comment is a stretch to the point of being ridiculous. GNU "extensions" tend to be smallish features that one would encounter when compiling code written with GCC in mind, or with GCC as the primary compiler. Cilk Plus has also been proposed for GCC, but it has not been released as part of GCC, and it's not clear that it will be released as part of GCC. It feels a bit like an arms dealer playing both sides of a conflict ''

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[gnasher719]

or GCC will simply grab the better code and GPL it leaving it with another lesser competator

You mean proponents of so-called "free" software would deliberately appropriate source code and try to prevent people from using it according to the license that the author intended?

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[RocketRabbit]

NIH syndrom inside the GCC project will ensure that this will never happen. Never, ever happen.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Microlith]

Unsubstantiated statement.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Microlith]

And you completely, utterly miss my point. Resorting to the "oh the source is still there!" argument while ignoring the fact that so much "secret sauce" will be kept back to discourage use of the open compiler in favor of the expensive, seat-licensed versions.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[lister king of smeg]

or GCC will simply grab the better code and GPL it leaving it with another lesser competator

You mean proponents of so-called "free" software would deliberately appropriate source code and try to prevent people from using it according to the license that the author intended?

i thought the BSD license was a "do what ever you want with it license". So the intent of the author is as is understand it is for you to do what ever you want with it including make it a different flavor of free.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[firewrought]

There is no sane business case for taking a commercial compiler front end and a commercial compiler back end, filling it with extra bugs and shipping it.

Um, what about JIT'ing OpenGL shaders and writing efficient software fallbacks for them? Or what about IDE's (VisualStudio, Eclipse) where many awesome features rely on the editor having a rich API on top of the compiler? RMS put GCC on the wrong side of the future here... many products can be made better by leveraging a compiler API at runtime.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[firewrought]

Meant to include link to what Apple did with LLVM and OpenGL: http://llvm.org/pubs/2007-03-12-BossaLLVMIntro.html

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[serviscope_minor]

You're completely wrong with LLVM domination provides a gateway for Vendors to break stuff.

No. You are completely wrong. You're talking about committing stuff upstream. I was talking about broken venduh tools.

The BSD license is a license for hardware vendors to fill their own compiler full of proprietary goodies, i.e. bugs.

Seriously, unless you have worked with embedded hardware with custom compilers you can have no conception as to how bloody insane hardware vendors are. Really. It's impossible to imagine because you would have the be completely broken in the head to imagine it. Well, that or a hardware vendor.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[LingNoi]

What secret source? It's time someone called out your bullshit. So show us this horrible abuse that's going on, well..? Where is it?

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[tlhIngan]

i thought the BSD license was a "do what ever you want with it license". So the intent of the author is as is understand it is for you to do what ever you want with it including make it a different flavor of free.

True, except the GPL claims to be even "freer" than free by the advocates who love to point how closed-source projects "steal" BSD source. The irony is that the GPL is doing the exact same thing which is legal, except the GPL forces are claiming it's superior and freer.

So you have one opensource license that basically legally takes code from another opensource license, except the changes can't ever make it back ("tainted"), yet that license is somehow "better" because it can do that.

Take the code - the authors intend for people to do that by choosing the BSD. Just don't claim to be the "best" free license because you can take and not give back.

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[tlhIngan]

Apple moved to LLVM is because it has a better optimizer than GCC

Actually, there's a HUGE movement away from FSF stuff because companies are scared of the GPLv3. The GPLv2 they could handle, but the GPLv3 imposes new terms and restrictions that companies are scared. Some are forcing all open-source software to go through lawyer reviews purely because of it. Some have maintained strict lists of "approved" open-source code that can be used in projects and internally, and that future GPLv3 projects will be disallowed except in exceptional circumstances, and only in tightly controlled ways. (It's much too easy to screw this up - all you need is v3/v3+ code and v2 code (not v2+) - you cannot combine the two at all due to incompatbilities).

Apple gives back to LLVM because well, they created most of the Clang project. They've been heavily investing in Clang+LLVM as a move away from the GPLv3. The last patches Apple gave back to GCC were related to Grand Central Dispatch, after which Apple concentrated fully on Clang+LLVM as the default compiler.

It took several years for this to happen - going all way back to the PowerPC days - I think 10.5 shipped with LLVM as an option over GCC, while 10.6 enabled LLVM but kept GCC as an option, and 10.7 stripped GCC completely.

A lot of companies are investing heavily in LLVM because of it - it means they don't have to worry about the GPLv3 at all. And a lot of companies also find it better to stick with and submit patches to mainline for maintenance rather than try to keep maintaining their own port

Re:Having a strong competitor to GCC

[Rich0]

Take the code - the authors intend for people to do that by choosing the BSD. Just don't claim to be the "best" free license because you can take and not give back.

If the authors didn't intend for people to take the code and re-release it under the GPL in a free competitor whose developments would be of no use to the original project they wouldn't have licensed it under the BSD.

If you say "go ahead and take advantage of me," don't be surprised when people do...

Re:Is time for a big FreeBsd celebration

[fostware]

Thanks for the clarification.

For a moment there I thought the AC was counting in binary

LLVM stands for....

[RedHat Rocky]

Low Level Virtual Machine. However, has little to do with what it is now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM

Rename needed, certainly, it is.

Carry on.

Re:Why switch at all?

[tuppe666]

Nothing has stunted the computer/software industries more than the introduction of the 8086 and the GPL.

Having lived with the the safe Duopoly of Microsoft/Apple [Years of IE6 was only part of the problem] dominate everything absolutely for so long. Other than providing a viable competitor, where commercial companies have failed to compete, and are swallowed up by these larger companies as the bundle all the profitable software I fail to see their relevance. The only effective competitor seems to have been GPL for obvious reason [its almost immune...although buying off key people and handing out free hardware doesn't hurt ;)], some may argue BSD...which is a nobler licence, but its kind of ironic in this thread, having seen how Apple's adoption of BSD as a one way suck has affected the BSD distributions. In reality New Apple has admittedly been worse taking advantage of the Patent system [the new threat to computing], and its closed garden, dirty back-room deals with content suppliers...And Ballmer is creating A New Microsoft in its image whatever you thing of that. I won't mention Google...which is leading computing which has a whole lot of issues associated with it [or Facebook, Amazon etc etc]

Lets face it GPL only is...was!? a threat to the safe Duopoly; the thing that has stunted the industry as they always do, but the reality is it wasn't enough of one.

"economic reasons"

[tlambert]

A lot of graphics software infringes on existing patents, but that isn't a reason you can state without risking treble damages in a lawsuit, so most of the graphics driver writers tend to just look the other way and hum as they dance past that particular graveyard. Practically, it's impossible to write genuinely competitive graphics code without infringing some East Texas idiot's patent.

There are also cases where code has specific strategic value to a company, and they want to amortize the cost of development over some period of time before they let their competitors use the code. For example, the Soft Updates code that Kirk McKusick, Julian Elisher, and I worked on for FreeBSD was licensed under a free-for-non-commercial-use license for a period of two years before we opened it up for general use. This was to allow us to recoup the investment on developing the code by allowing us to run our hardware without a UPS, while everyone else in the market had to have a UPS to deal with power failure and recovery. If you don't have it, you have to treat a power failure as a kernel panic and do a full fsck in order to return your disk to a known good state, since you can't otherwise guarantee that it wasn't a crash followed by a triple fault, which might have written bad data to some portion of the disk. So all the competing border router/SOHO server devices had to have batteries, which increased their cost relative to our product. It's one of the reasons IBM bought our company.

Yeah, it'd be great if some idiot were to spend 10 years of their free time neglecting their families so that all this stuff could be free, but no one really wants to be that idiot: people work on free software for love, and they work on the hard problems and productization in exchange for money, since no one is going to do scut work for free unless they're a masochist (if you happen to know one, though, I have a project or two they could tackle if they really wanted to suffer).

Re:"economic reasons"

[theArtificial]

Ignorant? I know plenty of people whose actions fit this description. Be they a mechanic who works late, an artist who is trying to make a name for themselves, or a developer who is passionate. When you're on your deathbed will you lament that you wished you would've worked more to your family?

Re:"economic reasons"

[Microlith]

No, it's the ignorant implication that someone can't actually get paid and make a living working on free software, and that people who work on free software are "idiots."

It's, sadly, typical of BSD-proponents.

Re:"economic reasons"

[theArtificial]

Oh, I see, thanks for the clarification.

It's, sadly, typical of BSD-proponents.

You are aware that BSD software is free and you're commenting on a paid Free Software Developer's post? Might be you're reading too deeply into what he's saying, the sentence which directly follows the line you have an issue with elaborates on this:

people work on free software for love, and they work on the hard problems and productization [sic] in exchange for money, since no one is going to do scut work for free unless they're a masochist

Most of the heavy lifting in software revolves around paid developers because they're working on highly specialized things. He mentions that his project specifically was not free for commercial use to cover the cost of development; He is working on free software and being paid. If they're getting paid then they're not spending "10 years of their free time neglecting their families so that all this stuff could be free, but no one really wants to be that idiot" 10 years of your time on something that you're not compensated for is arguably idiotic if its to the detriment of your family (not just talking software here, "Where was your Dad/Mom when you were growing up?" "He was never home")

Good job, guys!

[Brian Feldman]

I have been happily using clang++ at work for a while now and am thankful for the efforts in creating a real world-class open-source compiler suite! Glad to see FreeBSD become ever-freer!

Re:Good job, guys!

[kthreadd]

Wow dissing on GCC now gets modded +3 huh?

Nice...

Where does he mention GCC? From what I can tell he just mentions that clang++ works great.

Re:Why switch at all?

[lister king of smeg]

Odd how the most used *nix is GPLed -Linux
odd how veteran companies from the unix war (oracle, ibm, hp,) are pushing the use of LInux and other GPLed software.

maybe they figured out that sharing is best but if that were it they could have simply shared and setteled on a BSD. Or they realize that working where there competitor can't simply fork and close at will is best for everyone involved thus settling on a GPL licensed stack

Re:excellent!

[staalmannen]

If I remember correctly, OpenBSD was looking at PCC as alternative compiler. It would in a way fit their philosophy better considering that it is simpler/cleaner and pure C, so C++ does not have to become a systems dependency. In fact, PCC has also made some rather nice advances lately, like building a FreeBSD kernel, and there is always the challenge of building a Linux kernel with pcc (http://bsdfund.org/bundle/).

Re:WOW

[gnasher719]

Most likely the BSD maintainers and developers out there.... bout thats less then 0.00001% of 7+billion people. I'm going to guess anywhere between 1-1000 =)

Now add in all the Mac and iOS developers and the number increases just slightly. MacOS X 10.8 is completely built using Clang + LLVM. OpenGL uses LLVM. OpenCL uses LLVM.

Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[tepples]

You even mention why: what would these software packages be without their WAD files, tax definition files and encryption keys.

A video game licensed as free software could be modified to leak the decrypted WAD files. Furthermore, console makers forbid use of a copylefted engine. This means a copylefted game can't run on consoles, which means it can't use the large monitor and multiple gamepads that the player already owns for the console but wouldn't consider buying for a PC. (There are some major genres of video games that for economic reasons cannot be released as PC exclusives; I can explain in more detail if you wish.)

A DRM crippled video player licensed as free software could be modified to leak the decryption keys, something that Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. forbid.

A tax program licensed as free software could be modified to leak the decrypted tax definition files.

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[Crayon Kid]

Ah, but we should also point out that closed software on open hardware does little to achieve the above restrictions or protection of data. As long as the user has access to the underlaying machine they can still access the raw form of the program and the data. It's harder than having clear-text source code and unobfuscated data, sure, but it's doable.

The only environment in which closed-source code works is putting it on locked-down hardware, a "black box" of sorts with no external clue as to what's going on inside. You can sell such boxes to users (game consoles, media players) or you can keep them at your place and just rent the use of them remotely (web servers).

(if you're selling individual units to the users) and create a "black box" of sorts with no external clue as to how it works; or putting it on hardware you own and control fully, and just open the interface to the user (Web servers) -- which is pretty much the same as the previous, except you also keep the black box and just sell the use of it.

But if the code is always in a locked-down black box I don't see that it even matters anymore if it's "open" or "close".

Source code being open or close is not really the point, it's about whether the hardware is open or closed.

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[tepples]

Ah, but we should also point out that closed software on open hardware does little to achieve the above restrictions or protection of data.

It does enough to mollify Hollywood.

Think of it another way: If it's feasible to make money on a video game with a free engine and proprietary data, then why aren't there more popular video games built on engines that have been free from day one?

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[richlv]

A video game licensed as free software could be modified to leak the decrypted WAD files.

the amount of games being funded on kickstarter makes me quite bold to shrug at that argument. i could not have enough time to play all those games already... business models change.

A tax program licensed as free software could be modified to leak the decrypted tax definition files.

i'd expect a tax office to define common format for tax laws, and distribute w/o any charge such definition files, which should then be used by software. we're past the baby steps of it, and i do believe they have at least a couple of competent people working for the tax office in every country.

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[Crayon Kid]

If it's feasible to make money on a video game with a free engine and proprietary data, then why aren't there more popular video games built on engines that have been free from day one?

Not sure what you're asking, the first part of this question is completely disconnected from the second. And they both completely disregard what I've said above.

It doesn't matter if the code or the data is open or not. What matters is whether the hardware will cooperate to let you reverse engineer it.

As for Hollywood and game companies, they're not exactly poster children for moving with the times and waking up to the realities of technology.

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[icebraining]

Yeah, our tax software here in Portugal must also be closed source, by rules of the IRS (which must certify it), since it uses a private key to chain sign the invoices and such, preventing "accidental deletions".

In reality I extracted the private key from one of such applications using nothing but Ollydbg and notepad during my lunch hour, and I'm a newbie in software cracking.

The security of proprietary software is illusionary. He who controls the machine, controls the software.

Re:Free software could leak cleartext or keys

[tepples]

Think of it another way: If it's feasible to make money on a video game with a free engine and proprietary data, then why aren't there more popular video games built on engines that have been free from day one?

Not sure what you're asking, the first part of this question is completely disconnected from the second.

Then let me rephrase the question using grammatical parallelism to reconnect the first part to the second: If it's feasible to derive a source of revenue from releasing a video game with a free engine and proprietary data, then why haven't companies taken advantage of this feasibility and released popular video games with a free engine and proprietary data?

And they both completely disregard what I've said above.

Which is why I introduced that question with "Think of it another way". I was trying to establish the criterion of whether or not a particular business model has the potential for profit, as opposed to the criterion of whether or not a particular platform has the potential for perfect secrecy.

As for Hollywood and game companies, they're not exactly poster children for moving with the times and waking up to the realities of technology.

For companies that are behind the times, the six companies that make up "Hollywood" exert a disproportionate influence on legislation. My hypothesis is that this is due to campaign contributions, both overt (remember Chris Dodd's complaints after SOPA failed that Congress wasn't bought enough?) and as in-kind donations of airtime from their affiliated TV news outlets.

Re:If you'd excuse my french...

[Creepy]

The FSF has always granted an exception for compiling non-GPL3 software, but they don't like it. Others (like me) have feared they may pull such licensing sometime in the future, so having an alternative is a good thing - we shouldn't put too much power in the control of one relatively radical group.

Re:Why switch at all?

[KingMotley]

Odd how the most used *nix is GPLed -Linux

You'd need a reference for that. I would submit that BSD code is more prevalent than GPL in actual use by an order of magnitude or better.

Every copy of windows has BSD code in it (No, not the tcp/ip stack). But libraries to do things like zipping files, displaying GIFs, etc etc. Mac OS and iOS is based on BSD as well. Even linux has BSD code in it. So does the PS3, Xbox 360, and FreeNAS.

How is it incompatible?

[Anonymous Coward]

The output of GCC is not GPL'd.
BSD is aggregated with non-BSD and incompatible-with-BSD licensed code all the time (e.g. Windows with BSD's stack: the Windows code cannot be put in a BSD licensed product).

So how is the GPL license being incompatible with BSD's license OF ANY IMPLICATION AT ALL in using the GCC compiler with BSD?

Heck, the BSD code is (according to TdR and several other BSD trolls) incompatible with the GPL: when someone put a GPL only license on the code (despite the previous versions still being available as the BSD fluffers say is why the BSD is fine to use), TdR went BALLISTIC and insisted this was a copyright violation.

Re:How is it incompatible?

[LingNoi]

> So how is the GPL license being incompatible with BSD's license OF ANY IMPLICATION AT ALL in using the GCC compiler with BSD?

Apple is spearheading the process behind LLVM. When GCC changed to GPL 3 they began work on replacing GCC used in xcode with LLVM.

The whole including it in the BSD OS is because they don't want to be seen as hypocrites by depending upon a GPL program.

Re:How is it incompatible?

[unixisc]

The patent requirement in GPL3, where if one of the distributing parties has any patents that are being used by the said GPL software, they have to grant everyone who gets that software the right to use that patent. GPL2 did not have this, so Apple didn't have any problems in the past using GPL. But since GPL3 included it, Apple saw that it would no longer be able to protect its patents if it continued to use GPLed software, and so they tossed out any GPL software they may have otherwise used. It's not just GCC that's gone, but Samba as well.

KDE

[Seeteufel]

Is it possible to build KDE with LLVM?

Re:KDE

[jandrese]

It should be. Most projects compile with LLVM just fine, although there are a few holdouts. Wine doesn't work, and neither does VirtualBox.

Re:KDE

[kthreadd]

And for those projects I guess the FreeBSD ports system will just install gcc, so it will continue to build on FreeBSD. GCC is available in the ports tree, they just don't want to include it in the base system.

Re:KDE

[unixisc]

Hopefully, Digia ports Qt to LLVM/Clang, as well as to Objective-C

Re:KDE

[Seeteufel]

Traditionally BSD is a KDE shop, so I'd expect they would make it run.

Re:Why switch at all?

[chinakow]

Odd how IE was(is? [I don't follow browsers closely]) the dominate browser on the web for years and years. Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it is good. See also, PHP. People bitch constantly about it, and then go and write PHP code.

Re:Why switch at all?

[FranTaylor]

I would submit that BSD code is more prevalent than GPL in actual use by an order of magnitude or better.

How many android devices are out there with their GPL linux kernels? An order of magnitude more than the BSD-based Apple ones.

Your anti-GPL FUD is inaccurate and unconvincing.

[Medievalist]

It seems to me that the ability to "lock up" formerly free software has enabled the worst actors in the global market for computer software to accumulate wealth and power which they have then used to distort the market to the detriment of free software authors. The GPL is a response to this perception.

And frankly, while I support your freedom to release your code under any license you wish (a freedom many BSD people don't seem to like) I find these "GPL tekks away mah freederms" sound bites laughable. You said "it destroys the freedom to select a business model of your choice". What utter tripe.

The copyright laws that empower the GPL (if you choose to use GPL'ed code, instead of doing your own work with the sweat of your own brow) restrict your choices of business model, just like laws against theft, murder and rape do. Comparing restriction of choices to removal of freedom is disingenuous rhetorical grandstanding; do you protest the Earth's gravity restricting your freedom to fly? Do you protest the sun's light restricting your freedom to walk around naked without getting sunburned? Do you protest society restricting your freedom to practice cannibalism and slavery? Your argument is ridiculous; it sounds like you want to steal my work against my will and profit by it, and you're crying because copyright laws will allow me to prosecute you if you try to cheat me.

Use whatever license you choose, but stop pretending anyone ever had a "freedom" to use other people's code in ways the authors have specifically forbidden, and that this fake "freedom" has been taken away. Nothing has been lost except the ability to be an ugly, hypocritical parasite on the hard work of other people - people who are more than willing to share their efforts with the world, as long as the terms are share-and-share-alike, as in the GPL and similar licenses.

Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* share

[perpenso]

GPL is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and if somebody else makes it better they must share it with all the world, as I did."

That is quite misinformed. Organizations can modify and use GPL'd code internally, make a lot of money off of it, and not share with anyone. I believe Google does so.

BSD is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and I accept the loss that somebody else makes it better and keep it for themselves because I want to have the option of getting somebody's else software, make it better and keep it for me without sharing it back."

Beyond misinformed, merely a spouting of FSF spin.

In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit. BSD Unix arguably did provide quite a benefit to both hobbyists and corporations.

Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.

Re:If you'd excuse my french...

[FranTaylor]

we shouldn't put too much power in the control of one relatively radical group.

This is the ENTIRE REASON for the GPL: NOBODY can be "in control" of the source code.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[marcello_dl]

In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit.

Closed source is controlled source, it can't happen.

Look at OSX. Tomorrow apple decides iOS is fine for macs, dumps OSX and all its improvements to bsd will be lost like ballmer's chairs in google's direction.

Re:And thousands of Orthodox Stallmanites

[Rockoon]

Or maybe RMS just took a bath.

No, thats scheduled for December 21st, 2012.

Re:Types of freedom

[kthreadd]

I think it comes down to what you define as free software. The Stallman approach is of course very popular, but some say that's actually a bit more non-free since it restricts users of the source code and using BSD is in that sense more free. And it works well. Apple for example is using lots of FreeBSD in their operating system, and they contribute back.

Five different virtual machines

[tepples]

Who would put a compiler as part of their software (either FOSS or otherwise)?

Implementations of the Java virtual machine, the Common Language Runtime (.NET virtual machine), the ActionScript engine in an SWF player, the JavaScript engine in a web browser, or a shader engine in an OpenGL implementation need to compile platform-independent bytecode into platform-specific native code.

Re:WOW

[dgatwood]

To be fair, though, most Mac and iOS developers probably have no real reason to care whether FreeBSD is using the same compiler.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[perpenso]

In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit.

Closed source is controlled source, it can't happen. Look at OSX. Tomorrow apple decides iOS is fine for macs, dumps OSX and all its improvements to bsd will be lost like ballmer's chairs in google's direction.

Sure, lets look at Mac OS X. The Mach and BSD code is part of a kernel named Darwin. Darwin is available for download from Apple's site. As is the source code to various other permissively licensed non-GPL'd projects that Apple incorporates. No improvements will be lost. Many corporations using BSD give back.

Also, GPL'd code can be closed source as well. Look at various key services offered by Google where modified GPL'd code is not distributed by rather accessed.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[marcello_dl]

Darwin can be left open because there is so much closed source stuff atop it before one can use darwin to make a competitor to OSX. I am not saying this is not possible to replicate under the GPL, as Android is exactly that, a GPL kernel which is de facto controlled by Google. I am saying OSX is not Darwin. The applications depend on the GUI and the possibly closed source drivers.

And if somebody did, and if it got succesful, there is still the software patents weapon to use.

About GPL you described an earlier flaw, affero fixed that and I still think that those selling services based on improved OSS are not following the spirit of the earlier GPL, so again not a good point.

Re:So you leeched off someone.

[Anne Thwacks]

Yes. Probably you are young and foolish, or the code is of no consequence.Those of us old enough to have lawns have discovered that most of the code you have written needs supporting, and if you can write code, you would prefer to do something else than support it. If you have improved someone else's code, you probably dont want to support that either. If you have paid your staff to fix some code, you probably dont want to pay them to support it when they could be writing or fixing something else.

So give your code back, and the world will give youi support for free

Of course, if you have "borrowed" a TCP/IP stack from someone else, and prefer not to give it back, then you wont get free support (for your crappy OS, which you are afraid to expose to the glare of public examination).

Yes, I prefer the stabuility of FreeBSD over Windows for infrastructure. (But as a massochist, I prefer my desktop to BSOD :-)

Re:Types of freedom

[sl3xd]

Apple for example is using lots of FreeBSD in their operating system, and they contribute back.

Careful, pointing out that Apple contributes back to FOSS will get you lynched on /.

Pointing out that Apple releases their OS kernel under an open license, as well as pays to develop CUPS, WebKit, and LLVM/Clang, will result in them pissing on your grave.

There really are far too many GPL extremists whom condemn any software that doesn't fit into the GPL orthodoxy, even if they use alternate free software licenses. It's almost comical how much it has in common with the Catholic persecution of the heretical Protestants - only this time, it's with a software license of all things.

The BSD and Apache licenses are good examples of non-copyleft, free licenses, and in all honesty, they don't have to worry about compelling developers to contribute their changes because of simple economics: It's prohibitively expensive to maintain a closed fork, and is almost always much cheaper to just contribute the code upstream voluntarily. It's a different mechanism than the GPL's, but it still works very well.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[sl3xd]

Yup. In many ways, FreeBSD probably has more desktop users than Linux does; it's just that FreeBSD is renamed "OS X", and has a bunch of additional software dropped in. In many ways, OS X is FreeBSD with a set of additional proprietary userspace interface and API's dropped in.

And yet, in spite of OS X being a 'closed fork', Apple still voluntarily contributes a substantial amount of code back to FreeBSD. To me, it's proof that the BSD license works well, and that compulsory contribution isn't the only way to get those who improve your code to send the improvements to the community. It's also proof that "closed forks," while technically possible, are practically non-existent: Even Apple can't afford to maintain a closed fork, so they contribute code back upstream.

Sadly, there are far too many on ./ that let their emotions get in the way of factual reality, and focus on what might happen, instead on what actually does happen. Much like how the MPAA worries about how DeCSS could be used to facilitate piracy, even though in most cases it's just so we can watch our own DVD's.

Re:Why switch at all?

[beelsebob]

Sure.

1) Clang(++) produces better error messages. This is a mere nicity when dealing with C code, but it's an absolute requirement when dealing with template based C++.
2) Clang has a much more comprehensive set of warnings that get into static analysis of your code than gcc.
3) Clang is modular, and can be used to develop other tools using the same parser/type checker/...
3.1) Because of this, it's been used to develop a static analyser that can be seperately invoked (because it runs substantially slower than the compiler alone) which comes up with even more nice warnings.
3.2) Same again, but for a dynamic analyser which is in development, and does what valgrind does, and more, but without the 20 times slowdown, and with more accuracy.
4) Clang is not specifically designed with stopping it being useful to other developers in mind (RMS has very explicitly stated that one of the design goals of gcc is to make it hard to take apart and use different bits to do useful things in other tools).
5) Clang, when invoked with -O0, runs faster than gcc, for C code, 5-10 times the speed, for C++ code 1-2 times, and produces similarly optimal code to gcc -O0.
6) Clang, when invoked with -O3 or -Os produces faster code than gcc (though not by much).
7) Clang's license is more friendly than gcc's

Basically, clang is all round better than gcc.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[bluefoxlucid]

Cousin? I thought they were having sex.

Oh wait. Yeah, most BSD folks I meet seem to be Alabaman or Californian...

Re:Your anti-GPL FUD is inaccurate and unconvincin

[Bengie]

It seems to me that the ability to "lock up" formerly free software has enabled the worst actors in the global market for computer software to accumulate wealth and power which they have then used to distort the market to the detriment of free software authors. The GPL is a response to this perception.

The software is always free. What they do is not make their changes free, but the original is still free as ever.

An idea cannot be "stolen" or "taken away". The original will always remain.

Personally, I think most people's ability to think breaks down once "infinite" is involved. I have no qualms with GPL, but your argument is full of holes. You are as bad as the RIAA claiming others steal their work and every stolen copy is a lost sale. Please revise your argument, it makes the GPL look like a bunch of zealots use it.

Re:WOW

[Shag]

Yeah, probably not.

As an old UNIX/BSD hand who's now using a Mac, I'm a little hopeful that this might somehow make FOSS builds on the Mac easier, or make MacPorts a little more bulletproof.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[perpenso]

Darwin can be left open because there is so much closed source stuff atop it before one can use darwin to make a competitor to OSX.

That seems to be a strawman. The stuff on top of Darwin is neither BSD nor GPL, its not relevant. The fact remains that modified BSD code used by Apple is given back. Other corporations do so as well.

I still think that those selling services based on improved OSS are not following the spirit of the earlier GPL, so again not a good point.

The spirit of BSD is also to give back and share, and various corporations do follow this spirit without any arm twisting.

Re:WOW

[TeknoHog]

OpenGL uses LLVM. OpenCL uses LLVM.

Yes, in the same way as C uses LLVM. No, wait, doesn't C use GCC?

BSD is the carrot

[epine]

The BSD license protects the closed-source programmer's rights.

Are you the troll on Obama futures at Intrade last night who finally had to admit that "his reality" was not "our reality" (only the feeling evaporated after a good night's sleep)?

Obviously there are many of us out in the world who are intelligent, articulate, well informed and passionate about open source who don't parse the issue this way. Imagine that. You do you just lump us under "delusional" and continue to double-down on Romney? Obama will lose because "the nation won't tolerate another four years of his demonstrated incompetence". Do you have anything constructive to add to this?

Why should sharing ideas be morally mandatory in a society where sharing the wealth isn't? If deep down you believe that both are mandatory (I doubt this would make you popular) why do you wish to start with making the sharing of ideas mandatory, leaving the question of wealth sharing for a future generation to solve? Wouldn't the solution for both problem go hand-in-hand?

A guest at EconTalk recently observed that the industrial world now has two distinct inflation rates: a low rate for downscale merchandise produced in China and retailed by BorgBoxes, and a higher rate for personal services (such as haircuts). The lower classes have greater exposure to the low inflation rate, the middle and upper middle class has greater exposure to the higher inflation rate, and the one percent are making out so well that the inflation rate is merely a pimple on a flea's backside (like the Princess and the Pea, this doesn't prevent them from whinging about it). Darn it to hell, having someone else clean the toilet gets more expensive every year! We'll see about that! There is the economic theory of trickle down, and then there are the moral sentiments of trickle down.

A related concept that cuts along the same grain is the distinction between public goods and private goods. Certain types of economic activity produce the greatest benefit when widely distributed at the least cost. This gives Big Pharma big ulcers. Whenever you market a benefit where a large group of people pay for a benefit that only a subpopulation receives (as is the case with Lipitor and every other blockbuster of that nature) you are operating within a socialist regime. Now you can say that if you don't know who benefits and who doesn't, everyone is paying for the same share of a prospective benefit, so what's the problem? The problem is that Big Pharma goes to an immense amount of trouble to ensure that the studies which validate the efficacy of a drug do so on the largest possible population where they can get a statistically significant effect. Do they wish to study a subgroup which receives ten times the benefit, but which is only ten percent as large (at less scale and cost)? Absolutely not. No pharmaceutical wants to develop a product where a small population is paying $500 a pill, unless it's a cancer ward or something else equally dire. Here's the beauty of the model: the FDA doesn't really regulate drug-drug interactions. Old people taking a dozen different meds in the hope of actually receiving benefit from a few of them are mostly taking the risks of drug-drug interactions upon their own shoulders. Not our problem, says Big Pharma. Not your problem, nods the FDA. If actually fatalities (or strokes or psychotic episodes) are reported and traced back to drug-drug interactions, word goes out to the dispensaries. Sometimes a particularly troublesome drug is actually yanked or locked behind the thickest bars (MOAI antidepressants, terfenadine). This is the ugly side of socialism run by capitalists.

Now if Cayce Pollard develops a piece of software for the benefit of professional beauticians to keep their favoured clientele one extra quarter step ahead of the relentless march of fashion, should she be obligated to share around her source code, just because? Is this your idea of a public good? Or is th

Re:Why switch at all?

[KingMotley]

You really think that androids outsell iOS devices 10 to 1?

Re:WOW

[laffer1]

Last I heard, FreeBSD was going to use GCC from ports to build other ports that failed to compile with the system compiler (llvm). They've had to do this lately anyway because many things wouldn't build with gcc 4.2 anymore.

Native support for some ports may happen, but only if they believe there will be upstream cooperation. For instance, a bug with perl or tcsh would get fixed but GNOME or XFCE bugs won't.

Re:Why switch at all?

[KingMotley]

The latest numbers I could find (from google): 500M androids have been activated up until Sept 2012. 435M iOS devices sold up until Sept 2012 + 122M Macs (some weren't BSD based) + (approx) 350M iPods.

Also remember that every single one of those 500M androids are running some BSD code as well.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[manu0601]

Yup. In many ways, FreeBSD probably has more desktop users than Linux does; it's just that FreeBSD is renamed "OS X"

Not quite. OS X has a lot of Apple proprietary code, and a Mach microkernel that is not related to FreeBSD in any way. The FreeBSD influence can be seen in userland, but if you run ident /usr/bin/*|grep BSD you will find that NetBSD and OpenBSD are also big players in MacOS X

Millenium asked for economic reasons; I gave some

[tlambert]

There are also economic reasons that Android replicates a lot of internal Linux APIs in order to get out from under the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() so it can have faster/closed source graphics drivers.

Look, I most recently worked for Google on the ARM ChromeBook that Samsung recently announced. In the process, I did bring-up on the cellular modem and the camera, fixed the PMIC code, and did other things that ended up in the Linux Samsung 5250 board support, as well as rewrote the i8042 keyboard driver in u-boot in order to let it support ANSI 3.64 escape sequences for keys that couldn't be repreented by a single keycode. I also did work on the embedded controller and touchpad integration in the older original commercial Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung both.

I also filed for two patents.

Linux gets a lot of tactical development being released for free, and it gets a lot of strategic development that remains closed source. Just like much of the original Tivo work, and just like the actually high performance 3D nVidia support, all of which are also closed source.

A company which "gets" open source development "gets" that you give away the tactical stuff so that you offload your maintenance, and you hold the strategic stuff very close to you so that you can continue to afford to pay developers to work on stuff.

Google is in a fairly unique position in that most of the people playing with open source inside Google aren't supported by amortization of their work product, but instead are supported by advertising revenue. Frankly, most of them are not contributing to Googles bottom line (and I did not kid myself about this; I did some outstanding work, but probably the patents which could be used defensively if applied to phones or tablets was my biggest contribution to the bottom line).

So yeah, nice work if you can get it, but not something that generally generates revenue, and I know for a fact that there is a lot of code that Google has been struggling to get into Linux for many years (e.g. the virtual TSC resynchronization code for AMD processors, for one).

And the claim that BSD doesn't get a lot of commercial development is also BS.

I was on the Core OS kernel team at Apple for 8 years, and was the primary kernel person involved in getting Mac OS X's UNIX certification. Inside Apple, you are not allowed to write papers for external publication, or books, without a VP signature, and you are unlikely to get one, so even if things don't get crowed about, there's a hell of a lot of commercial effort going into BSD there.

Juniper also does a lot of commercial BSD development, and so do 3 of the top 4 L3/L4 switches and load balancers.

You just don't see it because people who Mention features or use" of BSD licensed code, at least for the traditional BSD license, have to give credit when they are claiming a specific feature, and so rather than bother, most companies simply don't mention it.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[perpenso]

Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.

but that seems to sound like arguing yourself in a corner. if all taxpayers should have equal access, why should some have ability to benefit from it, but restrict others from benefiting from the original release ?

No one is deprived of the original taxpayer funded release or taxpayer funded updates. It is only privately funded updates that *may* not be available. Note that in the Apple case their modifications to Mach and BSD are made available to the public.

Re:Can modify GPL'd code, make money and *not* sha

[richlv]

the "privately funded updates" benefit from he original release way, way more than what they get (might) release back. an as the "release back" is so involuntary, pointing at the few cases of it happening makes it sound like some sort of charity. which it is not.
humans are bad enough to feast on any opportunity. think of gpl as what capitalism is preached as - dealing and channeling basic human greed

Success of open source depends on...

[unixisc]

The 'lack of interest' argument applies to both BSDL and GPL projects - go the the GNU software page - how many of those projects do you think are very actively pursued? In either case, the authors can die, and the archived copies, despite being 'free', can go offline. The only thing ensuring the success of any open sourced project is a combination of developer interest in developing them, and corporate interest in promoting them.

Driver ABIs

[unixisc]

Having a common driver ABI simply means that if a driver is written for an OS once, it doesn't have to be recompiled again for different combinations of different versions of the kernel, the libraries and other variables that might be there. In other words, one driver written once to that ABI will work forever, since future versions of the OS are committed to it.

In the FBSD family (dunno about NBSD or OBSD), not only do they have drivers, but they never change interfaces that they've had since day 1. As a result, people w/ past knowledge about BSD can pick it up from where they left off, and continue to build on that. And for drivers, if a driver works on one version of the OS, one can be sure that it will work on all future versions of the OS.

This is normally true about Windows as well. Only exceptions - going from the Windows95 family of OSs to the NT family of OSs, the drivers would have been different. Similarly, while XP was based on win32, Vista and beyond were based on win64, which is why old XP drivers wouldn't work on Windows 7, and vice versa. But other than that, Windows too has a driver ABI, and so a driver written for Vista would work on Windows 7 or 8, a driver written for Windows 2000 would work on XP, and a driver written for Windows 95 would work on Windows 98 or Windows ME.

Re:Driver ABIs

[smash]

As per the AC, you are hopelessly incorrect. There have been major ABI changes in BSD with major releases, changes between XP64 and Vista/7 x64, etc.

And the fact that FreeBSD can support NDIS windows network card drivers also proves that providing compatibility for a driver ABI whilst making changes is possible via a software shim.

So the whole "we'll be tied to an ABI forever!!" is complete and utter bollocks.

GNU's not Unix

[blackcat]

It looks like GNU really isn't Unix anymore...

PCC

[unixisc]

I thought that that was just for a fork of OpenBSD - Bitrig. OpenBSD is still w/ PCC, the last I heard.

Re:excellent!

[unixisc]

There is already a fork of OpenBSD called Bitrig, where making it w/ LLVM/Clang is one of the main objectives.

What kind of support for a video game?

[tepples]

free software (open source you mean?)

Yes, I was referring to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are substantially identical to the OSI Open Source Definition.

There are no "economic reasons" to not make a software open source.

Say I work for a year developing a video game and I distribute it under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. Once I distribute one copy for a fee, someone else has every right to start distributing a copy of the binaries and source code for no fee, undercutting me and making sure that I distribute no more than one copy for a fee. So other than by distributing copies for a fee, what should I do to pay for my expenses incurred during development of the GPL video game, such as rent and food?

I assume you know the difference between free (as in beer) and open source software and that you are free to charge whatever price you want, even for GPL software?

Yes, I'm aware that software under an OSI approved license may be distributed for a fee. It's just that I don't see a way to convince a single entity to pay a large enough fee to cover all expenses before that entity starts distributing it to everyone else for no fee.

See Redhat, they make enough money out of completely free software.

Red Hat makes money on support contracts. What sort of "support" do you think users of a video game will need that's analogous to the support that Red Hat provides for its trademarked build of what non-customers call CentOS?

Re:What kind of support for a video game?

[devent]

The same argument goes for pirating. Does copyright prevent anyone from pirating your game? Does DRM prevent anyone from pirating your game? You see it really does not matter whether your game is open source or not.

It also really doesn't matter if you are demanding any money for your game or not.
In the Humble Indie Bundle you don't have to give any money at all. How does it makes for you any economical sense? The first raised $1,270,000 totally, $166,000 in average for each developer. The last one raised $1.4M. Without DRM, so anyone is free to torrent the games without issues.

Would it have mattered at all if the games were open source? Oh, the source code of some of the games were actually released! "Puppy Games has also released the source code for Revenge of the Titans[23] under a BSD-like license while reserving all rights to almost all game assets."

With games it is really a simple issue: release the code under the GPL and release the art works under a CC Attribution (and non-commercial if you like). That way if someone like to sell your game he or she must create their own art work.

Fact is that people pay money for good products. In "normal" economical sense the HIB would not make any money at all because people are selfish assholes that do not spend money if they are not forced to. So what went wrong? The products are good, they are not encumbered with DRM (which makes the games worse) and the delivery method is good: just download it with your browser.

The HIB is not the only example. www.gog.com offers also DRM free games. They make good money as well and expand their catalogue to up-to-date and brand new releases.

What sort of "support"

Blizzard is making an truckload of money out of supporting games. Starcraft 2, WoW, Diablo 3.
The same goes for every MMG (mass multiplayer game). Or just multi-player games.
Offer new addons, improvements, new missions, new art works for your game.
Sell T-shirts and tee-cups. Offer LAN-parties.

It does costs you nothing to sell a copy of your game, so why do you expect people to pay good money for a copy?
I don't know why any "copyright holder" (be it musician, artist, author, developer) is believing that just because they created something once in their lifetime they are now entitled to receive other people money for doing nothing. Your ass is really huge for all the gold dust blown into it by the current copyright and DRM laws.

It's just that I don't see a way to convince a single entity to pay a large enough fee to cover all expenses before that entity starts distributing it to everyone else for no fee.

Please give me one example. I never saw that happen before for any software.
Why should somebody buy a product and then distribute it to others for free? It does not make any sense.
For example, you are developing for me an accounting software. I pay for it, so why should I distribute it to other competitors for free?

Re:What kind of support for a video game?

[tepples]

The same goes for every MMG (mass multiplayer game).

MMOs are the only way I can see to offer support, but I don't see how to make MMO work in all genres, and people are still going to want to play games with zero bars of network signal.

Or just multi-player games.

How is a game played with 2 to 4 USB gamepads or 2 to 4 devices on a LAN any different in this sense from a single-player game?

Offer new addons, improvements, new missions, new art works for your game.

In other words, you're saying do it like Doom: GPL the engine, distribute only the first episode, and charge for mission WADs distributed under non-free terms. Or what am I misunderstanding?

Offer LAN-parties.

I don't understand how this works. Wouldn't that be expensive, requiring moving to a major-league city and leasing a lot of expensive major-city real estate?

Why should somebody buy a product and then distribute it to others for free?

That's exactly what the warez scene has always done.

For example, you are developing for me an accounting software. I pay for it, so why should I distribute it to other competitors for free?

Bespoke business software is different from video games. Unlike off-the-shelf software, bespoke software is priced high enough to cover the entire cost of development with the sale of only one copy.

Re:What kind of support for a video game?

[devent]

A 32 LAN router does not costs much. A few work-stations or Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) and locality is more then enough possibilities. Anyway that was only a few ideas with 5 minutes of though time. I'm sure a businessman like you can think of more ways to monetize your fan base.

Do you think any of the major musicians like Rolling Stones, Beatles, Madonna, etc. became popular if they would just sell CDs? No, there was radio (which was free), there were copies from friends (also free) and concerts. Why should it be any different with computer games?

That's exactly what the warez scene has always done.

What does that have to do with anything? The warez scene does not care for your copyright or DRM. They don't care if your game is under the heaviest of EULA protected by SecureROM DRM or open source.

Re:What kind of support for a video game?

[tepples]

No, there was radio (which was free), there were copies from friends (also free) and concerts. Why should it be any different with computer games?

Radio's not free anymore; labels have to pay "independent promoters" to get recordings on the radio. Perhaps the closest thing to radio is distributing the first mission as a demo, and I agree that's a good idea. The closest thing to concerts that I can think of is arcades, and those appear to have mostly died in the West apart from games for small children that give tickets.

What does that have to do with anything? The warez scene does not care for your copyright or DRM. They don't care if your game is under the heaviest of EULA protected by SecureROM DRM or open source.

If a video game were released under a license for free software and free cultural works, then ordinary people would feel that they have the right to act like the warez groups: buy one copy and share it with everybody else.

Re:Your anti-GPL FUD is inaccurate and unconvincin

[Medievalist]

The software is always free. What they do is not make their changes free, but the original is still free as ever.

I take it you are not familiar with the 'gated' debacle, then. Sometimes reality is more complex than license ideology.

But anyway, yes, what you've just described is exactly what the GPL is supposed to do. You can make any changes you want, and unless you start distributing or selling the changed version to others you have no obligation to ever disclose those changes, or publish your sources, and the original is of course as free as ever.

I find it odd that you are accusing me of being a zealot considering what I was responding to; the original post said that I, as an author of GPL'ed software, was taking away people's freedoms which is arrant nonsense and personally offensive. I think I'm entitled to react strongly when someone libels me, don't you?

As for infinity, I recommend to you David Foster Wallace's "Everything and More" - a difficult but wonderful book on that subject.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[sl3xd]

... a Mach microkernel that is not related to FreeBSD in any way.

Wikipedia doesn't seem to agree:

"The BSD code present in XNU came from the FreeBSD kernel. Although much of it has been significantly modified, code sharing still occurs between Apple and the FreeBSD Project.[4]"

The XNU kernel is more of a hybrid with the FreeBSD and Mach kernels glued together.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[petteyg359]

It's called VLC. The problem is the stupid legal situation.

http://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/

Re:So you leeched off someone.

[smash]

No. The open source code is still out there. I'm merely able to charge for the product that includes my modifications without releasing them. if someone wants to develop a new product or use the open source version it is still there.

Re:Is time for a big FreeBsd celebration

[smash]

Netapp, Juniper and Apple have quite a few more than 10 users between them.

Re:Welcome FreeBSD! from your cousin OS X

[manu0601]

Wikipedia doesn't seem to agree:(...)The XNU kernel is more of a hybrid with the FreeBSD and Mach kernels glued together.

Actually Wikipedia agrees with me. There are really two kernels glued together in OS X. System calls with positive numbers are dispatched to the BSD kernel (which is indeed close to the FreeBSD kernel) whereas system calls with negative numbers are sent to the Mach microkernel (which, as I said, have nothing to do with FreeBSD).

Mach is completely alien to FreeBSD. There is no concept such as Mach messages, ports and rights in the FreeBSD kernel.

Now I wonder how close the BSD kernel in OS X is to FreeBSD, compared to other BSDs. I have no opinion on this point.

Software ownership

[unixisc]

From that same essay, here is a nugget in the last but 3rd paragraph:

As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright.

I never claimed he said anything about selling the hardware and giving the software away - someone else did. What he advocates is that if you write software, you do not own it, and if you sell it to somebody, that somebody has the right to give it away even if you forbid him not to. In short, he denies you any of the privileges you'd assume to have despite having created the software. Note that the GPL itself ain't that daft - even they recognize the right of creators, but RMS doesn't. He thinks that you should violate the terms of the license agreement under which it was sold, under his utopian dreams of a perfect society.

Re:Why switch at all?

[cheesybagel]

Clang also produces lower performing binaries than GCC but try to find that on their comparison page...

Re:If you'd excuse my french...

[cheesybagel]

RMS himself has said the license doesn't matter if all you want is to compile code using GCC. The GPL doesn't forbid using a GPLed tool to create proprietary works. RMS only added the exception to placate the FUD you are repeating here. For more information try reading about the Electronics Arts Deluxe Paint case from several decades back when EA added a license clause to their paint program stating that all artwork created using the paint program was the property of EA. That didn't fly very well with the judge...

Re:And thousands of Orthodox Stallmanites

[cheesybagel]

Ever heard of Open64? It's not like GCC and Clang are the only C++ compilers out there.

Re:And thousands of Orthodox Stallmanites

[badkarmadayaccount]

Just in time for my birthday.