3 ms·
Stallman doesn't care if clouty companies fork GCC and add features he doesn't like. This is a freedom granted to all of us. The point is Stallman himself woul
by nly 12y ago
Stallman doesn't care if clouty companies fork GCC and add features he doesn't like. This is a freedom granted to all of us.
The point is Stallman himself would rather see upstream GCC become an inferior tool, or fall in to disuse and obscurity, than act in any way which, on balance, would mostly just enable proprietary software. We're talking about a man here who said (just less than two weeks ago at 31C3) that stealing food to survive, given no third option, was more morally justifiable than writing proprietary code for a living.
The author of this blog clearly doesn't understand this world view because they've set themselves up with a strawman to knock down, assuming it merely boils down to a strategic error on Stallmans part with regard to what is the most effective means by which to ensure the best products out there are FOSS.
- bilog 12y agoThe problem is that Stallman has painted himself in a corner here. On the one hand, he says: don't use LLVM/Clang, it's dangerous, use GCC instead; on the other hand, he says, no, you cannot add to GCC the features that you would need to use it instead of LLVM/Clang. The net result is that Emacs will not have a set of features that are _essential_ for development of C++ software, which in turn drives people away from using Emacs to other IDEs. He's not furthering the cause of GNU and the FSF, he is not promoting free software, he is _driving people away from it_. What's the point of making all those talks about the importance of free software, if you then actively _prevent_ free software from being useful? Software exist because it has a use, otherwise it's just a worthless exercise in futility.