LLVM Still Pursuing Apache 2.0 License + GPLv2 Compatibility

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 19 September 2016 at 09:11 AM EDT. 12 Comments
LLVM
It's been a while since last talking about the discussions among LLVM developers about re-licensing the project. The re-licensing is moving forward and they are settling on the Apache 2.0 license plus explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2.

For the past year they've been eyeing the Apache 2 license for the LLVM stack over their University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license.

LLVM founder Chris Lattner announced on the mailing list that the LLVM Foundation has hired a prominent OSS licensing attorney and they are moving forward with the re-license. Their aim is to keep a low-barrier for entry to new contributions, protect users, protect contributors, and eliminate the schism between runtime libraries and the rest of the compiler.

They remain confident in the Apache 2.0 license, but will be explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2 programs. There are differing views by attorneys and developers whether the Apache 2 license is compatible with the GPLv2, so as part of the LLVM license they will explicitly be stating their support. There will also be a binary attribution exception with the new license.

More details and discussion about the LLVM re-licensing via this mailing list thread.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week