The next logical step in relicensing is to drop the requirement to contribute also under the legacy license, next to the new Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception license.
Implementing this change has the advantage that a number of contributions become possible that currently are non-trivial: the project is missing out on contributions that aim to reuse code from other projects under (only) the Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception license. Examples are MS STL and IREE.
We don’t expect this change to cause any issues for contributors and users of LLVM.
From a timing perspective, it would be nice to align this change with a release, e.g. LLVM 19. If we time it right, we could avoid any issues around backporting from mainline to update releases, by implementing this change shortly after the last point release for LLVM 18.
The last update release for LLVM 18 is planned to be (if necessary) 18.1.6, on May 28, 2024. Therefore, the current working assumption is that we will implement this change shortly after that date.
If you would have any questions about this that would best not be discussed fully publicly, you can reach out to the LLVM Foundation board at board@llvm.org.
We try to keep the noise level low on the announcements category in LLVM Discourse. Therefore, if you’d like to reply or discuss this further on Discourse, please check if anyone has already created a topic in the “LLVM Project” category to do so, and continue the conversation there.
Thanks,
Kristof Beyls, on behalf of the LLVM Foundation.