A EULA in FOSS clothing, NetBSD with more LLVM support, Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0, FreeBSD Performance against Windows and Linux on Xeon, Microsoft shipping NetBSD, and more.
Headlines
A EULA in FOSS clothing?
There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source. As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time to write a detailed response — which he shortly thereafter elevated into a blog entry.
Let me be clear that I hold Jay in high regard, as both a software engineer and an entrepreneur — and I appreciate the time he took to write a thoughtful response. That said, there are aspects of his response that I found troubling enough to closely re-read the Confluent Community License — and that in turn has led me to a deeply disturbing realization about what is potentially going on here.
To GitHub: Assuming that this is in fact a EULA, I think it is perilous to allow EULAs to sit in public repositories. It’s one thing to have one click through to accept a license (though again, that itself is dubious), but to say that a git clone is an implicit acceptance of a contract that happens to be sitting somewhere in the repository beggars belief. With efforts like choosealicense.com, GitHub has been a model in guiding projects with respect to licensing; it would be helpful for GitHub’s counsel to weigh in on their view of this new strain of source-available proprietary software and the degree to which it comes into conflict with GitHub’s own terms of service.
To foundations concerned with software liberties, including the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Software Freedom Conservancy: the open source community needs your legal review on this! I don’t think I’m being too alarmist when I say that this is potentially a dangerous new precedent being set; it would be very helpful to have your lawyers offer their perspectives on this, even if they disagree with one another. We seem to be in some terrible new era of frankenlicenses, where the worst of proprietary licenses are bolted on to the goodwill created by open source licenses; we need your legal voices before these creatures destroy the village!


NetBSD and LLVM
NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support
I’m recently helping the NetBSD developers to improve the support for this operating system in various LLVM components. As you can read in my previous report, I’ve been focusing on fixing build and test failures for the purpose of improving the buildbot coverage.
Previously, I’ve resolved test failures in LLVM, Clang, LLD, libunwind, openmp and partially libc++. During the remainder of the month, I’ve been working on the remaining libc++ test failures, improving the NetBSD clang driver and helping Kamil Rytarowski with compiler-rt.
The process of upstreaming support to LLVM sanitizers has been finalized
I’ve finished the process of upstreaming patches to LLVM sanitizers (almost 2000LOC of local code) and submitted to upstream new improvements for the NetBSD support. Today out of the box (in unpatched version) we have support for a variety of compiler-rt LLVM features: ASan (finds unauthorized memory access), UBSan (finds unspecified code semantics), TSan (finds threading bugs), MSan (finds uninitialized memory use), SafeStack (double stack hardening), Profile (code coverage), XRay (dynamic code tracing); while other ones such as Scudo (hardened allocator) or DFSan (generic data flow sanitizer) are not far away from completeness.
The NetBSD support is no longer visibly lacking behind Linux in sanitizers, although there are still failing tests on NetBSD that are not observed on Linux. On the other hand there are features working on NetBSD that are not functional on Linux, like sanitizing programs during early initialization process of OS (this is caused by /proc dependency on Linux that i