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The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licenceThe reasons for GNU's care with gcc licencePosted Oct 27, 2009 18:41 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544)In reply to: The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence by tzafrir Parent article: LLVM 2.6 released
No they didn't. They could have contributed to GCC. That would have been extremely welcome and it would have helped the whole world.
Think of it this way. With the GPL, you start with the base A and let's say there are three contributors B, C, and D. The result it ABCD.
With BSD licence, B, C, and D each keep their work secret, so the world gets three compilers, AB, AC, and AD.
The result is crappier compilers, which is bad in itself and also creates less motivation for E and F to join in.
Intel chose not to help, and would only help on condition that we don't benefit from their work, but dozens of other companies are helping, so we don't need Intels non-contribution, and we do appreciate the contributions of the other companies.
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The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence Posted Oct 27, 2009 22:04 UTC (Tue) by dennisdjensen (subscriber, #25165) [Link]
You are forgetting base A. The motivation for others to join in on base A is not going to diminish,
just because 3 others had fun, and maybe even earned money on AB, AC, and AD. Au contraire.
Besides, often those 3 derived projects give somthing back, the same way e.g. Apple has given
The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence Posted Oct 27, 2009 22:19 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Apple's a perfect example. They didn't want to contribute back and tried to get away with publishing binaries. When the GCC devs refused this and pointed to the GPL, Apple then contributed their software as free software.
If they could keep their changes proprietary, then A wouldn't get any worse, but it would always be second best, so who'd use it? That, and it would break the the "same rules for everyone" principle that causes multiple companies to contribute to free software projects.
How many companies contribute to GNU/Linux? And how many to FreeBSD?
Companies are afraid to contribute to the free core when they know that their competitors can take those contributions, build on top of them, and not contribute back. Again, Apple's an example: they contribute back to FreeBSD only the stuff that they don't want to have to maintain separately. Crumbs.
The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence Posted Oct 27, 2009 23:22 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> Again, Apple's an example: they contribute back to FreeBSD only the stuff that they don't
> want to have to maintain separately.
So: how do you explain LLVM, then?
The reasons for GNU's care with gcc licence Posted Oct 27, 2009 23:43 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Every generality has occasional exceptions :-)
Maybe they've never gotten over that they had to contribute back to GCC so now they're supporting a compiler that might become something they can contribute to only as it suits them? Who knows?
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