4 ms·

The fear of GPLv3 is just an excuse to pull things into proprietary. They became aware of the success of GPL and started to actively lobby against it with what

The fear of GPLv3 is just an excuse to pull things into proprietary. They became aware of the success of GPL and started to actively lobby against it with what they were able to come up with.

snuxoll 6y ago
The change also means libgcc is now GPLv3 as well, making licensing for anything embedded that uses glibc (which has a hard dependency on libgcc_s) a royal PITA to figure out since GCC’s linking exception. Okay, so a proprietary program can link against libgcc without coming afoul of the GPL, but do we still have to make libgcc_s itself replaceable according the the anti-tivo clause? The FSF is shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle many of their projects today, GCC is no exception. Free software purity is a great goal and all, but what use is it when nobody uses it or it falls behind more permissively licenses projects.
qalmakka 6y ago
It doesn't matter. Sometimes in order to achieve your goals you must compromise or risk loosing the footing you already have, because you have close to zero chances of succeeding. If RMS had compromised on GCC in the '00s, i.e. if GNU had spun off the C/C++/ObjC front end as a separate GPLv2-or-later library upon which something like clangd could have been made, Clang would have never existed. Yes, LLVM would have still been present, but as a special-case backend that used GCC as its frontend instead than its own, as they were planning to do since the beginning. All these improvements you talk about would have been done under the GPL, and not BSD licenses or proprietary. IDEs like Xcode and such would still be proprietary like they are nowadays, because there was a 0% chance of getting Apple or whomever to release them under the GPL. It doesn't matter how much strong your moral principles are, or how much you value integrity. The world is definitely more pragmatic about software and values different things than RMS; while this might or might not be beneficial to our overall society, that's the way it is. Ignoring it is myopic, if it does not outright amount to shooting yourself in the foot.

The fear of GPLv3 is just an excuse to pull things into proprietary. They became aware of the success of GPL and started to actively lobby against it with what they were able to come up with.

snuxoll 6y ago

The change also means libgcc is now GPLv3 as well, making licensing for anything embedded that uses glibc (which has a hard dependency on libgcc_s) a royal PITA to figure out since GCC’s linking exception. Okay, so a proprietary program can link against libgcc without coming afoul of the GPL, but do we still have to make libgcc_s itself replaceable according the the anti-tivo clause? The FSF is shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle many of their projects today, GCC is no exception. Free software purity is a great goal and all, but what use is it when nobody uses it or it falls behind more permissively licenses projects.

qalmakka 6y ago

It doesn't matter. Sometimes in order to achieve your goals you must compromise or risk loosing the footing you already have, because you have close to zero chances of succeeding. If RMS had compromised on GCC in the '00s, i.e. if GNU had spun off the C/C++/ObjC front end as a separate GPLv2-or-later library upon which something like clangd could have been made, Clang would have never existed. Yes, LLVM would have still been present, but as a special-case backend that used GCC as its frontend instead than its own, as they were planning to do since the beginning. All these improvements you talk about would have been done under the GPL, and not BSD licenses or proprietary. IDEs like Xcode and such would still be proprietary like they are nowadays, because there was a 0% chance of getting Apple or whomever to release them under the GPL. It doesn't matter how much strong your moral principles are, or how much you value integrity. The world is definitely more pragmatic about software and values different things than RMS; while this might or might not be beneficial to our overall society, that's the way it is. Ignoring it is myopic, if it does not outright amount to shooting yourself in the foot.