FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC

[blacknova]

Hear, hear!

I have nothing against FreeBSD or CLang LLVM. But it infuriates me to know that wealthy companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sony take BSD licensed software and incorporate it into their products, and then give comparatively nothing back to the community. Red Hat spends a comparatively huge amount of its annual spending on writing software that it releases under free licenses - usually the GPL. Apple has contributed a lot to some BSD projects, but as a percentage of their revenue it's rounding error.

The FreeBSD community and everyone that uses a BSD license has every right to choose that license, and I bear them no ill will. But I am frustrated that companies that could make free software far better for everyone choose not to do so, and for that reason I'll always prefer the GPL.

Have you participated in development of any of BSD-licensed software that have been take in by companies? If not, why are you frustrated if developers are willing to license it under BSDL knowing all consequences?

[Awesomeness]

And as a result, BSD development is heavily dominated by Apple nowadays. What exactly is your argument?
I don't use WebKit (anymore), but I fail to see how that is relevant. It started as a KDE project and is only open today thanks to the LGPL. Otherwise, who knows, WebKit probably would have been as open as iTunes.

CUPS is actually nice.

LOL! Make up your mind! First you claim that BSD development is dominated by Apple, then you claim that WebKit would not be open if its origin wasn't LGPLed.
So why does Apple “dominate” with BSD licensed contributions on one hand but would close WebKit if it had the chance? Clang could easily be a closed source front-end to LLVM if Apple wanted. Clang is a contribution by Apple to LLVM which, btw, started as a University of Illinois project. Your logic does not make any sense at all.
Apple could completely close off Clang, create a proprietary fork of LLVM, etc.
WebKit's current JavaScript engine was completely developed in-house at Apple and thanks to the first L in LGPL Apple would have no need to open source it. Apple holds all rights to CUPS and could close it at any time. Apple was never ever obligated to Apache/BSD-license OpenBSM, libdispatch, WebKit's JavaScript Core, Clang, etc.

PS: Apple contributed with a full-time programmer to Mozilla development for several years: Even more Apple leftovers to avoid for you.

[kraftman]

Yes, you're stupid.

[kraftman]

Kicking ass, because of licensing problems is not really friendly.
As Awesomeness already said many FreeBSD developers are Apple employees.
BSD folks love Microsoft? As far as I know Linux accepted Microsoft's code into kernel and Ubuntu has Mono installed by default.

Not just because licensing (but this is very important), but also about manpower and support. That's true and they're controlled by Apple which is bad. I met with this many times when comes to FreeBSD users, but OpenBSD folks probably doesn't count - they seem to be anti proprietary which is good. There's a nice trick with MS code in the Linux kernel. Someone else described this before. Thanks to this MS has to support Linux and if they say Linux sucks they're hypocrites, because they now support Linux and write its code. Afaik MS code was terrible and they had to clean it, too. They rather felt bad. Most of the Linux community didn't like mono to be included and the newest Ubuntu is mono free.

[XorEaxEax]

First off, Apple didn't create CUPS, CUPS was the backbone of *nix printing way before Apple bought it because they needed a wide printing solution. Now CUPS was GPL, right after Apple bought it they changed the licencing to excempt themselves from the GPL so that they (but noone else) could use/modify CUPS in a proprietary manner.

As for webkit, they forked it off KHTML and they certainly put alot of work into it but so has MANY other contributors, and unlike the other contributors Apple has been dragging their feet when it comes to releasing their source changes and not doing so until they recieved several complaints.

In short, I have no trust whatsoever in Apple when it comes to their open source endeavours, luckily LLVM in particular is recieveing alot of support from outside Apple, some from big corporations who could pick up the gauntlet once Apple decides that they have no need for further open collaboration.

PS: Apple contributed with a full-time programmer to Mozilla development for several years: Even more Apple leftovers to avoid for you.

This surprised me, who?

[dnebdal]

Hear, hear!

I have nothing against FreeBSD or CLang LLVM. But it infuriates me to know that wealthy companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sony take BSD licensed software and incorporate it into their products, and then give comparatively nothing back to the community. Red Hat spends a comparatively huge amount of its annual spending on writing software that it releases under free licenses - usually the GPL. Apple has contributed a lot to some BSD projects, but as a percentage of their revenue it's rounding error.

The FreeBSD community and everyone that uses a BSD license has every right to choose that license, and I bear them no ill will. But I am frustrated that companies that could make free software far better for everyone choose not to do so, and for that reason I'll always prefer the GPL.

So far they've been fairly nice about it, though. And in the worst case, FreeBSD will eventually have to maintain a fork of whatever version of it is the latest pre-apple-takeover, together with all the other non-apple users. That's not the darkest of futures.

[blinxwang]

What's all this fuss over, anyway? Who cares about what FreeBSD adopts? They can make themselves proprietary and sell their OS, for all I care! It's not like it will make any difference; it's a server/hobby OS and it always will be. It's time the FreeBSD devs got over themselves and accepted the fact that they will never achieve the kind of success Linux has, and I think that them adopting a toy compiler like LLVM signifies that they're getting the message.

[pingufunkybeat]

PS: Apple contributed with a full-time programmer to Mozilla development for several years: Even more Apple leftovers to avoid for you.

Apple are welcome to contribute to FLOSS projects, good for them. You are fighting strawmen and need to drink a tea and relax.

None of this changes the fact that a lot of the core BSD infrastructure is becoming controlled by a company known for not being particularly open. None of your red herrings change that.

[Michael_S]

Have you participated in development of any of BSD-licensed software that have been take in by companies? If not, why are you frustrated if developers are willing to license it under BSDL knowing all consequences?

I'm not frustrated with the developers, I'm frustrated with the companies that generate wealth, often massive wealth, using source code from BSD license projects and then give back comparatively little to the community.

I've got four kids and the oldest is still under age ten, so by the time the kids are asleep in the evening I don't have the mental energy to contribute to anything. But I'm hoping once the kids are all five or six years older and my life is slightly more sane I will have the mental energy to spend my evenings contributing to some aspect of the Debian project or one of the GPL-licensed packages that it incorporates. I realize that until I start delivering real contributions (code, documentation, forum support, or otherwise) my intentions are just hot air.

[XorEaxEax]

server/hobby OS and it always will be.

Not at all, it's used widely in lots of embedded products not to mention in OSX and IOS, however the reason those companies chose FreeBSD was because the licencing allowed them to keep their changes proprietary, and that means that FreeBSD will not progress as fast as it could have should these companies release all their changes back.

By comparison Linux is developing at an amazing pace, with a huge amount of corporate full-time developers pushing tons of code (sometimes to Linus chagrin), why is this? Some BSD advocates will claim that it's because of a lawsuit which BSD was entangled in 20 years ago where Linux apparently grabbed all the *nix mindshare and has been able to hold on to it ever since, to this I have to say 'LOL, seriously?'.

In my opinion the reason is that GPL ensures a level playing field for all participants in the kernel development, no one is allowed to keep their enhancements closed if they want to distribute anything with those enhancements. For a company to release some enhancement back which a competitor can snatch up while not returning the favor like with BSD will make little sense in the boardroom. Meanwhile with GPL everyone is bound by the licence to play fair. Certainly in a perfect world this would not be necessary and companies would just contribute back because it's the right thing to do and there would be no holding out, but in the world we live in I think that for collaborative development GPL makes perfect sense, even more so for companies which are generally the equivalent of an extremely selfish person.

However, if you are not really interested or atleast not at all dependant on collaborative development then BSD likely makes better sense. Also for component style code like libraries/frameworks I think BSD or LGPL is the perfect fit as it allows inclusion into all types of licenced code and is in itself merely building blocks.