fighting against an open source monopoly. [LWN.net]

The right to fork allows building a program to compete with gcc out of gcc, but still somebody has to sit down and *do* it. For reasons that have been explained in the article and the comments, this is far from easy. Until then gcc remains a monopoly as it is the only viable free compiler out there...

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 25, 2007 12:28 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

I agree that you can say that GCC has a virtual monopoly on the Free compiler market (whatever
that is), but it's also important to note that there are none of the usual disadvantages of a
monopoly as the price is still quite fair and the barrier to entry for competition remains
low.

The only real complaint that someone might bring against a Free software monopoly is that a
mono culture is weaker against attacks.

For OpenSSH and OpenSSL those attacks are 0-day exploits, for GCC it could be patent suits.

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 25, 2007 16:19 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

GCC doesn't do anything so unusual in the compiler world that pcc is likely to be
invulnerable.

(I mean, what'll they sue over? tree-ssa? GCC invention. SSA form? You'll find a GCC hacker's
name on the original paper, although he wasn't a GCC hacker then. But maybe they have a patent
on the concept of rendering a register allocator impossible to reimplement by means of heaps
of implicit dependencies ;} GCC would certainly be hit by *that* where the competition
wouldn't...)

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 25, 2007 17:29 UTC (Thu) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

As far as I remember IBM has a patent on hierarchical menus, that they slapped SCO with in
their counter suit, so I wouldn't be too surprised if someone turns out to have an equally
basic patent on compiler construction.

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 26, 2007 10:26 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Compilers are old enough that the really basic stuff should have expired (*if* someone didn't
re-patent it, which would of course be an invalid patent, not that that stopped anyone
before).

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 25, 2007 18:03 UTC (Thu) by bboissin (subscriber, #29506) [Link]

Some regalloc and out-of-SSA algorithms are already patented.

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 25, 2007 21:27 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh yes, register allocation and graph colouring is a patent minefield, but 
hopefully IBM is helping there...

fighting against an open source monopoly.

Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:36 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

As are certain instruction scheduling techniques, such as various techniques in and around
software pipelining, predicated (conditional execution) and so on.  These techniques are
important to superscalar processors, especially (but not certainly not limited to) VLIW / EPIC
style processors.  

(Full disclosure:  I'm named an inventor on two such issued patents.  Take that as you will.)

Can you compile the Linux kernel with another compiler other than GCC? Do you have binary compatibility between compilers especially for C++? (The answers were no for earlier versions of Intel's C/C++ compiler.) Depending on what you define as a monopoly, an answer of no to either question indicates some characteristics of a monopoly is present.

It's nearly impossible to write an OS kernel using only portable C, and the Intel C compiler actually pretends to *be* GCC and implements a lot of GCC extensions in part so that it can compile the kernel. As for C++ compatibility, I thought the Intel compiler conformed to the same (originally Itanium) C++ ABI as GCC, HP C++, and others do: there have of course been bugs in this conformance, but that hardly makes a monopoly.

Of course you're right, a FOSS monopoly is nothing like a normal one. What Theo meant is there aren't many alternatives (if any) which leads to less pressure on the project, and subsequently to possibly worse code. Look at KDE/Gnome - sure, duplication of efforts, but also sharing of ideas and competition/coopetition - which is good for both. GCC could probably use a competitor/coopetitor, which is the point he makes.