Comment by astrange
20 days ago
Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects writing. Avoiding reading LLVM or GCC is to protect you from other kinds of IP issues, but it's not a copyright issue. The same people contribute to both projects despite their different licenses.
They don't call Clang a "clean-room implementation". Unlike Anthropic, who are calling their project exactly that
A clean-room implementation is when you implement a replacement by only looking at the behavior and documentation (possibly written by another person on your team who is not allowed to write code, only documentation).