Have you actually READ the article?

Have you actually READ the article?

Posted Oct 4, 2008 10:16 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Phantom menace? Threat that, so far, has not existed? Sorry - you are DEAD wrong. by drag
Parent article: Plugging into GCC

The license worked then... so it won't work now?

Argh. WHY the license worked then? Apple and MCC specifically asked "can we distribute our front-ends as proprietary plugin to GCC" and RMS said "no" - after that GCC got C++ and ObjectiveC. And this worked because there were no simple way to write proprietary plugin and claim it's "independent work" (you were and still are pretty much forced to use large chunks of GCC code to interact with backend).

Look; There is a reason why people pored work into LLVM instead of improving GCC.

Yes and there are reason why Unix went nowhere while Linux took it's place. BSD went from being "something far beyond Linux" to "roughly equal, sometimes better, but often much worse". Yes, Apache/BSD licenses attract more developers and they do more work which is then wasted when companies go out of business. NetBSD tale should teach us something. The question today is: is GPLv3 (which makes it impossible for proprietary vendors to ship GCC with proprietary extensions - they can only ship extensions without appropriate copy of GCC) enough to prevent balcanization of GCC or not?

If you want people to use a GPL license and create open source software, making it impossible to do the work they need to get done is a shitty way of accomplishing that goal.

The question is, of course, not so simple. It's more like: do people want to create free software or do they want to create proprietary software, how many of the second camp can be pressured to first camp and how many of guys from first camp will go away in frustration if plugins will not be implemented? Answers to these questions are not easily obtainable - we can only guess...

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