Pragmatic/Religious [LWN.net]

Pragmatic/Religious

Posted Oct 24, 2006 0:03 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872)
In reply to: Pragmatic/Religious by GreyWizard
Parent article: FSF should separate GPLv3 changes (Linux.com)

Both license choice and technical decisions were driven by the same
pre-set political decision. And I wouldn't call it pragmatic - even
if you agree that blocking creation of (independent) proprietary
backends had been worth the trouble, you still have 100% genuine
proprietary derivatives of gcc that might very well not be such
if they would not be artificially made work-intensive. Well done,
RMS... The same thing had served as additional barrier to alternative
free compilers and _that_ contributed to gcc stagnation in late
90s (basically, until egcs fork). That same thing had actually
_reduced_ the number of viable frontends; granted, m3 folks had
their own kind of fucked-in-headness that added problems, but...
Basically, we have all usual results of PHB with a vision forcing
political, er, considerations on a project and not bothering to
think of consequences. BTW, "religion" is not the word I would
use, but then I'm not as polite as Linus. My preference for
description would be "SNAFU by a high-level suit with agenda".

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Pragmatic/Religious

Posted Oct 25, 2006 23:01 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Again, the decision had positive consequences: but maybe you don't care
about the existence of the Objective C and (IIRC) C++ frontends. Some of
us do.

Pragmatic/Religious

Posted Oct 25, 2006 23:36 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

ObjC is definitely in the same realm as m3 (if even that - cvsup is
seriously used and non-trivial, whatever.app tends to be... Applish,
for the lack of printable description). As for the C++... I would
be very surprised if that one hadn't used enough code from C frontend
at any point in its evolution to be a clear derivative, but ICBW.

Note that "your library is a derivative of my library, you get to
play nice wrt license" is entirely different kind of story. But
in that respect GPL is not something special - e.g. LGPL would
have the same effect.

If anything, I would expect any losses to be in weird backends for
embedded CPUs from hell, but considering the usual quality (and
bitrot rate) of those I'm not sure that I'd call it a loss... BTW,
ought to recheck if patches from FRV tree had finally got merged
into -HEAD; the last I've heard was "4.3 might be able to recognize
FRV-specific constraints in the kernel; it's too late for 4.2"...