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Stallman: GPL ramifications and purpose
- bsiemon 15y agoThis headline grossly misstates the content of the post. Apple wanted a closed source front end that could be linked with the open source gcc internal/backend. At no point would the existing GCC code ever become proprietary under this flawed scheme.
- simcop2387 15y agoThis wasn't Apple at this time. This was after Jobs had been ousted and had gone with NeXT.
- ra 15y agoAlso note that RMS wrote this in 1993
- RexRollman 15y agoAlthough I do not care for everything Stallman says and does, I do appreciate his consistency.
- jey 15y agoWhy didn't Apple just have their front-end emit GNU C with #line directives?
- simcop2387 15y agoIt would have probably been far more annoying to compile to something like that. I've not programmed in Objective C but I believe that it was designed to avoid some of the issues that arose out of C++ being originally a preprocessor like that on top of C. Given that they wanted to do that, having to compile to some kind of IR, then to C, they would have likely had a much harder time getting the code optimized in any reasonable manner. I would also imagine that this would make debugging any part of the compiler that ended up producing incorrect code far more difficult to do.
- sambeau 15y agoAgain, this was NeXT; not Apple. I believe that the early Objective-C compiler did emit C.
- zitterbewegung 15y agoAnd eventually Apple starts supporting LLVM and the rest is history. Less and less of GCC is being used by Apple these days.
- SeoxyS 15y agoKeep in mind, Stallman is the douche who wrote this: Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing. Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective. I think he's lost the right to offer opinions about Steve or Apple.
- scq 15y agoStallman wrote this in 1993.
- benatkin 15y agoBased on the domain next to the headline, I thought Stallman was posting to Google Plus for a minute. Heh. (I was surprised to see Douglas Crockford posting there.)
- Joeboy 15y agoRegistration required. Could somebody paste or summarize the link? Thanks.
- cpach 15y agoIt's the second message in this document: http://www.anonymous-insider.net/free-software/research/1993/0704.html http://www.anonymous-insider.net/free-software/research/1993... The first message also gives a little more context.
- smoyer 15y agoI'm just not wasting time reading anything RMS has written ... Thanks for the memories but: - You've jumped the shark. - You're no longer relevant. - You've alienated so many of your fans. - You've pushed zealotry to a new level. - You've turned a conversation into a continuous rant. And the sad part is that I suspect you'll never look back on what you did accomplish and feel satisfaction. You'll just continue raging against the goals you couldn't reach.