Honestly, kudos for the author. This seems to be a one man's effort (https://github.com/rui314). He is making a free (as in money and freedom) AGPL product for general purpose usage (linux) and he is selling a particular integration for a particular audience (mac users).
I honestly hope he succeeds in this endeavor. It shows you can do a one-person open source project and still live off of it.
Well fair enough if they're trying to make enough money for this to be a business. I still suspect they won't succeed. How many businesses are so constrained by link times on Mac that they're willing to pay to reduce them? (And go through the admin effort of paying for something.) But I hope we don't see any tedious comments here about how this is a moral outrage because all software should be fr£e.
> But I hope we don't see any tedious comments here about how this is a moral outrage because all software should be fr£e.
All software should be free-as-in-freedom, but not nescessarily free-as-in-£; though I acknowledge that the former without the latter is often problematic. Plus, even beyond the "moral should", practically speaking, going non-FOSS this means it gets excluded from GNU/Linux distro packages, which IMO would be a fatal hit for something like this.
But honestly, I'm fine with this move. It's still FOSS for FOSS-systems, while support for non-FOSS systems is non-FOSS. The folks who care about free-as-in-freedom won't be affected by this. And even then, the non-FOSS `sold` is source-available, which covers 3 of the 4 freedoms; and IMO that missing freedom is the least important.
> I still suspect they won't succeed. How many businesses are so constrained by link times on Mac that they're willing to pay to reduce them? (And go through the admin effort of paying for something.)
A reasonable amount of software is "free-as-in-£ for personal use, paid for professional use." Lots of orgs are willing to ask individual devs "are there any dev tools you use that we should be paying for" and are willing to pay the $50/mo for IntelliJ, so $10/mo for `sold` seems to me like it stands a chance? Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD, and is only paid for individual-developer use.
>But honestly, I'm fine with this move. It's still FOSS for FOSS-systems, while support for non-FOSS systems is non-FOSS. The folks who care about free-as-in-freedom won't be affected by this.
I completely agree. If you believe "software should be Free!", then you're going to be using a Linux (or other FOSS) system, not MacOS. On top of that, Apple users are happy to pay through the nose for Apple products, plus apps in the Apple app store. Many studies have shown that app developers make much more money in the Apple app store than in the Google Play store, because Apple users love spending money on stuff, and Android users tend to be much more frugal. Apple users were the ones totally happy to throw away their wired headphones and rush out and buy $150 AirPods when Apple took away their headphone jacks. So this company is smart with this move: make the product a paid product for that group of users that has proven they're happy to spend lots of money on things. If anything, this company might have erred by not pricing it high enough to make it look like a luxury purchase.
> Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD
The relevant part of the EULA [1] states:
> Individuals who use the Software only occasionally, or non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual such as CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), are not considered Active Interactive-use Users ("AIUs"). No additional fees are required for such uses.
I had to read it multiple times to understand the CI/CD bit. It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual" or if it's an example of "non-interactive use that is not explicitly invoked by an individual" - the wording is unclear to me and can have either of the opposite interpretations.
At my day job, we occasionally test C++ code changes by compiling in a CI/CD system to obtain a container image that we can push into a staging environment. This means we have a develop-compile-test cycle where the "compile" step involves pushing to a merge request branch, waiting for CI/CD to finish, and then running a deploy script to push out the newly-built image for testing. I wonder if this would be considered "Active Interactive-use Use" or not.
Apple themselves could take note and decide to negotiate a license for the sake of their customers. Businesses are often willing to pay for something that would ordinarily take an R&D team some NRE to develop. And Apple has a great deal of money. They could free it up for adventurous customers as soon as they negoiate terms. And the amount of work it would take to integrate it into the next generation of XCode (as a tested/verified alternative to ld64 via -fuse-ld=mold) would probably be pretty modest.
> How many businesses are so constrained by link times on Mac […]
Long link times are not specific to OS X / iOS. Large C++ codebases are some of the worst offenders and emit obscene numbers of relocations and DWARF symbols (or similar) into object files that bog linkers down. KDE, Firefox and Chrome browsers instantly come to mind. Rust and GHC generated object files also take a whiiiiiiiile to link[0].
On the businesses being constrainted by the link times subject more specifically. Über posted an article a while back enunciating the shenanigans they have to go through to build their iOS app (the app download at some point measured in a 300Mb+ vicinity): https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/how-uber-deals-with-large-io... . From the «Build Times» section of the blog post:
> The default pipeline builds the app in 21 minutes; the new pipeline with no machine outlining takes 53 minutes, which includes about 7 minutes of llvm-link, 14 minutes opt, 11 minutes of llc and 3 minutes of the system linker. One round of outlining takes about 7 minutes in llc, and 2 rounds take 9 minutes. Each additional round adds progressively less extra time, usually under 30 seconds. Overall, 5 rounds of outlining builds in 66 minutes — a 45-minutes addition to the baseline.
So, a default CI/CD build with no outlining heuristics applied spends 10 mins (7 + 3) out of a total of 53 mins in the linker. That is for a single CI/CD run.
And, since at least company has funded the work on fixing relocatable file generation in mold, there is indeed at least some demand:
> GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) in particular uses re-linkable object files as dynamic libraries instead of real .so files, and it didn't work with mold. Now, mold can produce object files that GHC can load. Note that this work was funded by Mercury, so thanks to the company to help us improve the product.
[0] Fun fact: I have measured the memory throughput at the GHC linking time (via LLVM lld); it averages 65Gb/sec, and it can occasionally shoot over 70Gb/sec. So a faster linker still matters.
Businesses may be not constrained with the link times, but they for sure are worried with growing executable sizes. And large dev teams rarely reduce the code size, they just keep adding layers and layers of code as the time goes, eventually running beyond the permissible app size on the appstore. Can it solve such growth problem? Many large companies will be "sold" on this idea instantly https://twitter.com/stantwinb/status/1336890442768547845
There's at least one compiler whose developers are complaining about the slow speeds of LLVM's linker. As far as I remember the only thing keeping them from using mold was the absence of a Windows version. Why they didn't sponsor it though, I'm not sure, it looks like Rui would take on some paid work.
I don’t necessarily think software should be free. Info think that it is beneficial for discovery and for use of the software itself is for free. Exactly for the reason you mention, the administrative burden of paying for a license. Having to understand what it means if I want to run the software on build servers/ci/cd. How do I get lelicense files there etc.
If it just works and I need to make sure I shell over the appropriate amount for our usecase it will already be easier.
If I need to pay up front to see how much real world gain we would get I am much likely not to do it. (Looking at you EE graalvm specifically now.)
The only "moral outrage" here would be if they released experimental code (as they called it) into the gpl version, got people to test out, make prs for it, then yanked it out before it was complete and moved out to the paid version. No clue how it actually went here.
Isn't compilation mostly linker constrained in realistic scenarios? I mean first compilation time is quite long, but then it's often linker who is to blame for most of the compile time.
It depends. Optimized production builds are dominated by compile times but developer local builds are mostly only compiling a hand full of files but need to link the whole binary (other compilation objects can be reused as they have already been compiled in the past and haven't changed).
Chromium build time after changing a single source file is about a minute completely dominated by link time. And this is with a development component build when most of the code is split into separated DLLs.
> this is a moral outrage because all software should be fr£
Forget that for a moment. Economically speaking, there's tons of free competition and it doesn't have any real problems. That means the market price for a linker is $0. As you point out, people aren't going to pay for a faster one.
I'm a huge fan of SublimeText the editor, but not a huge fan of SublimeText the company behind it. The balancing act they did was sell licenses that are good for an entire major version (eg SublimeText 2, 3, etc.) that never expire. I'm comfortable enough to pay $50 for a good IDE major version even though I dislike the company's development direction (eg, I'm probably not going to buy SublimeText 4 because of the plugin chaos).
EDIT: "Sublime Text license keys are no longer tied to a single major version, instead they are now valid for all updates within 3 years of purchase" - looks like I'm a pirate then.
I remember reading that something related to function sections wasn’t supported?
If it actually works as an alternative linker option for static linked Haskell builds using ghc on osx I will happily pay for this. But I need more info about the suport surface area they are committing to!
Readit News
I honestly hope he succeeds in this endeavor. It shows you can do a one-person open source project and still live off of it.
https://twitter.com/rui314/status/1593464571586830336
See Licensing on https://github.com/rui314/mold/releases/tag/v1.7.0
Also `sold` is a genius name.
All software should be free-as-in-freedom, but not nescessarily free-as-in-£; though I acknowledge that the former without the latter is often problematic. Plus, even beyond the "moral should", practically speaking, going non-FOSS this means it gets excluded from GNU/Linux distro packages, which IMO would be a fatal hit for something like this.
But honestly, I'm fine with this move. It's still FOSS for FOSS-systems, while support for non-FOSS systems is non-FOSS. The folks who care about free-as-in-freedom won't be affected by this. And even then, the non-FOSS `sold` is source-available, which covers 3 of the 4 freedoms; and IMO that missing freedom is the least important.
> I still suspect they won't succeed. How many businesses are so constrained by link times on Mac that they're willing to pay to reduce them? (And go through the admin effort of paying for something.)
A reasonable amount of software is "free-as-in-£ for personal use, paid for professional use." Lots of orgs are willing to ask individual devs "are there any dev tools you use that we should be paying for" and are willing to pay the $50/mo for IntelliJ, so $10/mo for `sold` seems to me like it stands a chance? Note that `sold` is still free-as-in-£ for use in CI/CD, and is only paid for individual-developer use.
I completely agree. If you believe "software should be Free!", then you're going to be using a Linux (or other FOSS) system, not MacOS. On top of that, Apple users are happy to pay through the nose for Apple products, plus apps in the Apple app store. Many studies have shown that app developers make much more money in the Apple app store than in the Google Play store, because Apple users love spending money on stuff, and Android users tend to be much more frugal. Apple users were the ones totally happy to throw away their wired headphones and rush out and buy $150 AirPods when Apple took away their headphone jacks. So this company is smart with this move: make the product a paid product for that group of users that has proven they're happy to spend lots of money on things. If anything, this company might have erred by not pricing it high enough to make it look like a luxury purchase.
The relevant part of the EULA [1] states:
> Individuals who use the Software only occasionally, or non-interactive use of the Software that is not explicitly invoked by an individual such as CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), are not considered Active Interactive-use Users ("AIUs"). No additional fees are required for such uses.
I had to read it multiple times to understand the CI/CD bit. It's not clear to me whether the EULA says that CI/CD is an example of "use that is explicitly invoked by an individual" or if it's an example of "non-interactive use that is not explicitly invoked by an individual" - the wording is unclear to me and can have either of the opposite interpretations.
At my day job, we occasionally test C++ code changes by compiling in a CI/CD system to obtain a container image that we can push into a staging environment. This means we have a develop-compile-test cycle where the "compile" step involves pushing to a merge request branch, waiting for CI/CD to finish, and then running a deploy script to push out the newly-built image for testing. I wonder if this would be considered "Active Interactive-use Use" or not.
[1] https://github.com/bluewhalesystems/sold/blob/main/LICENSE.m...
Long link times are not specific to OS X / iOS. Large C++ codebases are some of the worst offenders and emit obscene numbers of relocations and DWARF symbols (or similar) into object files that bog linkers down. KDE, Firefox and Chrome browsers instantly come to mind. Rust and GHC generated object files also take a whiiiiiiiile to link[0].
On the businesses being constrainted by the link times subject more specifically. Über posted an article a while back enunciating the shenanigans they have to go through to build their iOS app (the app download at some point measured in a 300Mb+ vicinity): https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/how-uber-deals-with-large-io... . From the «Build Times» section of the blog post:
> The default pipeline builds the app in 21 minutes; the new pipeline with no machine outlining takes 53 minutes, which includes about 7 minutes of llvm-link, 14 minutes opt, 11 minutes of llc and 3 minutes of the system linker. One round of outlining takes about 7 minutes in llc, and 2 rounds take 9 minutes. Each additional round adds progressively less extra time, usually under 30 seconds. Overall, 5 rounds of outlining builds in 66 minutes — a 45-minutes addition to the baseline.
So, a default CI/CD build with no outlining heuristics applied spends 10 mins (7 + 3) out of a total of 53 mins in the linker. That is for a single CI/CD run.
And, since at least company has funded the work on fixing relocatable file generation in mold, there is indeed at least some demand:
> GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) in particular uses re-linkable object files as dynamic libraries instead of real .so files, and it didn't work with mold. Now, mold can produce object files that GHC can load. Note that this work was funded by Mercury, so thanks to the company to help us improve the product.
[0] Fun fact: I have measured the memory throughput at the GHC linking time (via LLVM lld); it averages 65Gb/sec, and it can occasionally shoot over 70Gb/sec. So a faster linker still matters.
If it just works and I need to make sure I shell over the appropriate amount for our usecase it will already be easier.
If I need to pay up front to see how much real world gain we would get I am much likely not to do it. (Looking at you EE graalvm specifically now.)
Forget that for a moment. Economically speaking, there's tons of free competition and it doesn't have any real problems. That means the market price for a linker is $0. As you point out, people aren't going to pay for a faster one.
[1] https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md
This instantly kills a lot of goodwill and puts "sold" into "unavailable" rather than "expensive" bucket.
A license for a major version number? And then buy a new license for the next major bump up?
Okay fine.
But a never-ending fire hose of money coming out of my bank account is big nope. I have enough small monthly recurring charges, thanks.
EDIT: "Sublime Text license keys are no longer tied to a single major version, instead they are now valid for all updates within 3 years of purchase" - looks like I'm a pirate then.
If it actually works as an alternative linker option for static linked Haskell builds using ghc on osx I will happily pay for this. But I need more info about the suport surface area they are committing to!
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