Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 1, 2010 17:16 UTC (Thu) by cracauer (guest, #15239)
Parent article: Two GCC stories

Where's the third story, which is that the GPLv3 on the newest GCCs create quite a bit of a mess for the BSDs and for Apple, and they might do something about it?

If it leads to a second high-quality compiler that's fine with me but the method chosen is quite appalling.

Right now the BSDs and Apple use a GPLv2ed compiler. They have to and voluntarily do feed changes back. If they switch to a compiler that isn't GPLed at all as a reaction to the GPLv3 you would remove that.

I am not a friend of the GPL in the first place but my understanding of the thought behind the GPL is that they want changes fed back. They achieve quite the opposite.

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Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 1, 2010 19:55 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (3 responses)

> [...] my understanding of the thought behind the GPL is that they want changes fed back.

I'm not going to be pedantic and add a link to documents describing the four freedoms the GPL is designed to protect. But encouraging to have "changes fed back" is not included in those freedoms, not even implicitly.

Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 1, 2010 22:04 UTC (Thu) by cracauer (guest, #15239) [Link] (2 responses)

OK, let me rephrase it.

The point about the GPL is that changes to a certain package stay free.

Making changes to the GPL that drives existing users (and contributors) of GPLed software into switching to software that is not GPLed at all doesn't seem to serve that goal. That applies to both the amount of free software out there in general, and it also applies to fixes and improvements to the GPLed package in particular, in this case gcc.

It gets worse when the new license is more complicated and creates legal issues even within GNU software, as shown here.

Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 3, 2010 22:26 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Sorry, the issues aren't new with GCC's switch to the GPLv3. It's really got nothing to do at all with the GPL. It is the entirely predictable result of using a broken license (GFDL) for the documentation, instead of the GPLv3.

Amount of free software

Posted Jul 4, 2010 11:19 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Speaking as a card-carrying FSFE supporter: the goal of the FSF is not so much to increase the amount of free software, as it is to make all developers and users aware of the role of freedom in software development and usage. Even a larger number of users is not as important as having conscious users. The amount of free software follows from the awareness, and not the other way around.

Let's see a prominent example: Apple's OS and certain core components based in free software. If people using these free components are completely unaware of the benefits of the freedoms they have (because the free parts are embedded in a thick layer of proprietary software) then said freedoms are not doing any good, except for Apple developers. As Apple users outnumber Apple developers by a large factor, making a small number of those users aware of why freedom is important would be much more important than having Apple developers switch to proprietary software. You can easily see why, in this regard, a marginal but freedom-aware OS like Debian is much more important to the free software movement than a popular but oblivious platform such as Apple iOS, or even Android.

On the other hand it would appear that the Open Source movement does indeed worry mostly about the amount (and number of users) of free software, even if in the process the freedom part is toned down. Many Linux developers are firmly in this camp, and that is why they would like to maximize use of Linux everywhere, even if certain components have to stay proprietary to achieve it.

There is a middle ground here (maximize the number of users while educating them in freedom), but as is so often the case it is not easy to achieve.

Contributions from Apple and *BSD?

Posted Jul 8, 2010 13:07 UTC (Thu) by froydnj (guest, #68565) [Link]

> Right now the BSDs and Apple use a GPLv2ed compiler. They have to and voluntarily do feed changes back.

Minor nit: nobody has to feed their patches back.

Please point to significant patches provided by the BSDs and Apple recently. I think I've seen a few +/-10 lines patches for *BSD configury and the like over the last several years, but epsilon-close-to-zero contributions from Apple. I do realize Apple has contributed significant bodies of work in the past, but those days are long gone. My impression of the BSDs is that while they may make changes locally, those changes tend to not make it back to the FSF source tree.