Compiler Explorer, LLC

It’s been over a year since I updated my blog; and I’ve been making some pretty fundamental changes to the infrastructure I host it all on. So this is more of a test post than a hugely informative one.

That said; the reason I’be been making those changes is because, a couple of weeks ago I formed “Compiler Explorer LLC” as an Illinois-based corporation.

Does this mean Compiler Explorer is going to be a business now?!

No.

Compiler Explorer is a community service, and I am committed to keeping it that way. It should be open source, free and available to as many folks as possible.

So, why did I form an LLC? Well, for the longest time I’ve been making informal agreements with various third parties: commercial sponsors, proprietary tool providers, and compiler vendors. As time is going on, and the “informal-ness” is becoming more, well, formal… I owe it to myself and my family to put in a little legal protection between me the person, and Compiler Explorer the entity.

The LLC gives me that protection. It also gives me a place to hang all the assets (we have some contingency savings), and put things like the AWS account under. And that then leads the way to – eventually – making a non-profit or other appropriate organisation to own and operate CE. If done right – and I’ll be taking a lot of advice on this – that should safeguard CE for the community, even without me. Not being morbid, but the bus risk factor preys on my mind a little.

So; the blog changes and many other upheavals in my use of AWS are all in service of this: moving out all the non-CE things from “my” AWS account before I consider it “Compiler Explorer LLC“‘s account. That seems safer and easier than trying to move CE’s stuff into a new account, even though that would be a lot more “clean”. As Amazon don’t make it easy to transfer assets between accounts this seems the best way.

Right, back to copying all my personal backups from one S3 bucket to another…