Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

Posted Sep 16, 2010 1:57 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

I'm confused why the GPLv3 has anything to do with this at all. Is it because Apple only stopped playing nice because it refuses to touch GPLv3 code?

Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

Posted Sep 16, 2010 4:38 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed. The author offers us not a single quote supporting the implied notion that Apple's decision constitutes GPLv3 backlash.

Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

Posted Sep 16, 2010 15:06 UTC (Thu) by atgreen (guest, #33284) [Link]

I don't know about Apple's opinion of the GPLv3. My opinion, however, that there's a real problem with GCC's GPLv3 Runtime Library license exception. For instance, does the exception apply to a separate libgcc.so? The FAQ suggests that it should, but try coming to that conclusion from the exception language itself. IANAL, but I believe that this would make it impossible to build many kinds of closed systems with GCC even if there was no other GPL'd code on the box. I know for sure that issues like this are scaring people away from the v3 licensed compiler.

Also, re: libffi. There are many copyright holders. All but one (a major non-Red Hat contributor) agreed to sign assignment papers to the FSF many years ago. This was enough resistance to stall my efforts. In retrospect I'm glad this didn't happen, since it probably would have been relicensed under the current v3 runtime exception license.

I hope this is an honest mistake that the FSF can correct or clarify soon. I've reached out to them a while ago.

Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

Posted Sep 17, 2010 21:35 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link]

It's pretty well known. There was a lengthy discussion about it on the LLVM mailing list when the libc++ project was announced. libc++ is a direct reaction to GPL v3.

Apple's Selective Contributions to GCC

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:49 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

Apple stopped contributing changes back to GCC at the time when GCC switched license to GPLv3, many people think the timing is not a coincidence :)

They have continued to enhance GCC, but using their own copy of the GCC 4.2 code, which is GPLv2. Those enhancements have not been applied to later (GPLv3) versions of upstream GCC because it is FSF policy not to accept code without copyright-assignment.

The reason the changes are not in upstream GCC is because of FSF/GCC policy, not because of the GPL. The GPL allows anyone to take Apple's changes, port them to current GCC and release their own version of GCC. That "anyone" is not likely to be the FSF, because of the copyright assignment policy.

For the record, I think the copyright assignment policy is a good thing and I couldn't care less about ObjC support. If any ObjC users really want Apple's changes in a recent version of GCC they can merge them and release their own version.