Subject: BSD Toolchain Summit The FreeBSD core team and the FreeBSD Foundation have been talking to various industry about the collective desire for a BSD licensed toolchain. Different partners have different reasons including: - A desire to ship products with compilers or debuggers installed without the complications of GPL compliance. This could enable user debugging or third party software development. - The need for a modern toolchain without GPLv3 encumbrances. Some organizations have decided that GPLv3 is entirely unacceptable, but the current GPLv2 toolchain is being left behind. - The possibility of performance improvements. The core of the strategy being pursued most actively is to replace GCC with LLVM. Once LLVM is available in the base system, functionality such as cross platform compiled BPF or firewall rules becomes a much simpler task as all supported architectures are automatic. We are hoping to hold a toolchain summit on the subject immediately prior to the BSDCan conference (on May 10th). Our primary goal would be to develop a solid picture of where we are, what's being worked on, and how we could fill in the missing pieces. I am contacting you because we think you would have something to contribute to the summit. We would like to gage interest in such as summit and hope to make a final decision within a week. If you are interested in attending or can think of someone who should attend, please let me know. Thanks, Brooks