Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 25, 2014 9:20 UTC (Sat) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by silvas
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

> As an LLVM developer, I'm pretty confident in saying that there isn't a
> single one of us who likes maintaining private branches, and if we had
> our way with things we would do everything in the public tree.

Why wouldn't you want your licensing term to reflect this practice then?

> [**] Realistically, they are just as competitive along every technical
> dimension. For example, you'll never see an Apple compiler with better
> C++1y support than the public Clang.

What about better ObjC support? What about iPhone platform support?

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 26, 2014 0:28 UTC (Sun) by silvas (guest, #87887) [Link] (1 responses)

> Why wouldn't you want your licensing term to reflect this practice then?

Because keeping private branches is a necessary evil. They are a pain, but the alternatives are much worse.

> What about better ObjC support?

As far as I've seen they just work on it in the public tree.

> What about iPhone platform support?

I assume you mean that the platform is locked down?

Well, that's their platform. They make the rules for who gets to compile for it. Now, you may say "well, they shouldn't restrict who gets to compile for their platform!" and that's fine, but it's a different issue, one which goes to the core of Apple's business model and the society that enables it and the individuals that make up that society. Even if LLVM/Clang were to magically become GPL'd tomorrow, the platform would still be locked down.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 26, 2014 18:25 UTC (Sun) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Is the ObjC runtime library public? AFAIK Apple open sourced the compiler but not the runtime library, and as a result two competing runtimes existed from GNU and NextSTEP.