Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

> In fact Google is busy bringing LLVM and Clang to the condition where they could replace GCC. GPLv3 is big part of the reasoning.

Please provide documentation. If you are only making this up as you go along, then please be honest about it. LLVM taking over GCC has been talked about for eight years now, and I see no sign of that happening yet. Actually, LLVM taking over GCC does not even make sense. LLVM is not a compiler, it is a project for creating compilers. If it out-competes parts of GCC, there is little preventing GCC from using LLVM as an optimizer tool. What I have seen over these years is GCC out-competing all proprietary compilers, with Intel as the last hold out. Yes GCC, not Clang, it doesn't even have openmp yet, so it will only be a real contender in a year or so.

> it's not clear which part of exception will play if we are talking about libstdc++.so.* distributed in isolation

So you don't know, and I am getting a bit tired of doing all the digging for you. Before you spout more statements, I suggest you dig further and figure out if bundling libstdc++.so with Android is a license violation or not. Maybe the Necessitas guys at Digia can help you out.

Why Google did bionic I don't know, but it can very well be for other reasons than license. Again, I have not seen any issues building proprietary stuff with glibc. After all, all applications on linux does it.

> Why would it lose carriers if it's all too ready to lock phones again at their request? Yes, HTC made a mistake and issued unlocker which was usable for carrier-subsidized phones.

Sorry, but I am starting to feel really grumpy. Let us sum up your findings:
-no carriers lost
-tool reverted for one phone in August 2013 (a weak and struggling HTC caving in)
-tool provided two years earlier (ref. http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader ), with no carriers lost for the entire two years
I call that pretty sound proof that the unlocking thing is a no-brainer. It did not shut anybody out of the market, and it will not shut anybody out of the market as long as somebody stands up. Right now you seem to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Actually this reminds me of when Netflix claimed that they could not make a version for linux because they needed the whole system locked down. Only silverlight could do the trick, and it was a demand from Hollywood. Finally, TI made a chip where they hard-wired DRM into it to satisfy the claimed demands of Hollywood so that the first Android device finally got Netflix. Fast forward a few months later, Netflix was available on all Android phones (apparently they could not withstand the anger of all the customers being left out). Only weeks later they started to provide patches for Netflix on CyanogenMod, at the time a totally DRM free version of Android.

I am sick and tired of intelligent people telling me that it is all hopeless, and that we should just give up. Giving up is not an option.

> Right. <sarcasm>Let's add Apache and BSD liceses to the list, too (because, you know, they are GPLv3-compatible).</sarcasm>

This is beneath you, you should know GPLv2+ provides the code "at the recipients option" under GPLv3. That is very different from blending in GPL compatible code. For all practical purposes you can regard GPLv2+ as providing the same rights as GPLv3+, only differnces is that you can mix it with GPL2-only code, and fork it to GPL2-only code.

> Today… six years after release GPLv3 is still used by many times smaller number of projects than GPLv2 and even if you combine GPLv2 and GPLv3 you still have much smaller number that GPLv2 had ten years ago.

And why do you think this is? I can only see two important factors in keeping GPL2 alive. One is that Linus fought it, and he is pretty influential. The other is that FSF made GPLv2 and GPLv3 incompatible, a terrible mistake that makes me want to cry.