LLVM is a great project and brought the possibility of .NET/Java tooling to C and C++, but just check the amount of GPU shader drivers, Swift and some embedded compilers for examples of companies abusing BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects.
> LLVM is a great project and brought the possibility of .NET/Java tooling to C and C++, but just check the amount of GPU shader drivers, Swift and some embedded compilers for examples of companies abusing BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects.
Its not "abuse" to do something the license is designed to permit. Not everyone -- and particularly not everyone who chooses non-copyleft free software licenses for their projects -- agrees that the reciprocal obligations enshrined in the GPL represent fundamental moral obligations that exist without the GPL and that violation of them is "abuse" in the absence of a agreed requirement, e.g. contained in a license, to adhere to them.
On the other hand, consider the following: Emscripten, Numba, Julia, Rust, Pyston, Pure, Polly, Mono-LLVM, ghc -fllvm, Terra, ... and those are just the ones I can think of in a few seconds. Several of these have the potential for huge impact over the next decade, and nearly all of them would have been significantly less viable either using GCC tooling (due to license-driven architectural decisions) or building a backend from scratch.
LLVM is known for being rather ruthless with their API refactorings. This has the twin advantages of keeping the code quality very high, and giving people an extra incentive to contribute upstream (e.g. the PS4 compiler backend). I won't go so far as to say this is intentional, but it does represent a rather amusing way to discourage users from keeping everything in-house.
Code under the Microsoft Reference Source License is also available, but would you not consider it an abuse if, say, Microsoft made a LLVM-based language under that license?
The code being available is only useful if you can use it, and my point is that projects under most FOSS licenses can't use GPL-licensed code, which only takes without giving back in a usable form.
LLVM is a great project and brought the possibility of .NET/Java tooling to C and C++, but just check the amount of GPU shader drivers, Swift and some embedded compilers for examples of companies abusing BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects.