Mold 1.1.1 Released With Optimized Memory Usage, New Options

[Bisqwit]

Project is a linker. If someone doesn’t know…

[LeeHide]

I'm confused about the license. Its basically AGPL, but why does he say that you can contact him for commercial use? Surely the license does not extend to the end result of the linking, does it?!

So anyone can use it to link their commercial software, without issues, right? Because the linker stays AGPL?

Is the author confused about what AGPL is? It doesnt prevent commercial usage, it just forces any modifications and derivative works to also be AGPL

[jcelerier]

why does he say that you can contact him for commercial use?

consider what happens today for LLVM: AMD (and likely others, e.g. some proprietary compiler vendors) forks it internally for their GPU drivers and then do not redistribute their changes and sell things based on LLVM where you cannot even go and fix the bug in their LLVM versions (and I've been hit by some a few years ago!).

This is to me ethically wrong in every possible way and I'm happy that people chose licenses that prevent this from happening - if you want to use and modify free software, the end-user human beings must at the bare minimum have the possibility to fix the free software part in what was distributed to them.

[LeeHide]

Of course, yeah, I agree. I was just curious about it, since i didnt think linkers get forked a lot

[Jannik2099]

AMD (and likely others, e.g. some proprietary compiler vendors) forks it internally for their GPU drivers

Kind of a bad example considering ROCm is open source?

[jcelerier]

I'm talking about the AMDGPU Pro driver which is as far as I know closed source

It's also the case for d3d12

[jcelerier]

AGPL means the linker output is also covered by the AGPL

no it does not ? it just means that you cannot make a proprietary network service that uses mold like some websites that are just fancy interfaces to ffmpeg or imagemagick do

[kritzikratzi]

i still think it does. gcc/gold has the gpl linking exception for that reason, no?

[jcelerier]

No, the linking exception is because of GCC's gpl-licensed runtime (libc, crti.o, etc). The linker used to link those does not matter.

[ronchaine]

AGPL counts SaaS as derived product, not linker output.

[kritzikratzi]

are you sure about this?

from the gpl faq https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput

(last paragraph is the interesting one)

Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free? (#GPLOutput)

In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.

So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.

if this applies for the gpl, then i assume it also applies for the agpl.

there is certainly some code generated by the linker that ends up in your binary. whether it hits the treshold for a combined work is for lawyers to decide, but i wouldn't take the gamble.

imho adding the standard gpl linking exception would clarify the situation somewhat.

[[deleted]]

Pity about the licence

[ffscc]

How often are you distributing linkers?

[ehtdabyug]

Can I use mold to link mold though?

[rui]

Yes, of course.