Emacs and clang?
Emacs and clang?
Posted Feb 7, 2014 11:38 UTC (Fri) by dakas (guest, #88146)In reply to: Emacs and clang? by emk
Parent article: GCC, LLVM, and compiler plugins
I've always tried to evaluate Stallman's actions based on his stated goals, and I've generally found that he is ethical, straightforward and clear in pursuing those goals. Here, however, it appears he is choosing to punish Emacs users because of his personal distaste for LLVM.Uh no. The current situation basically is a dangling carrot in favor of supporting approaches and communities that in turn are rendering the GPL useless. The approach taken by the GPL is to not rely on goodwill. It is a tool based on legal restrictions on reuse of software and its modifications as a whole. Restrictions as a tool for ensuring freedom are always balancing a limited unfreedom against a long-term freedom. Just how the balancing part turns out depends on what happens in the real world. The overall situation around LLVM has been engineered to favor convenience. That is largely by design, and some of that design plays into the hands of people on the lookout for proprietary solutions. A significant part of the LLVM company support is related with that, and it leads to improvements and benefits that make GCC look less compelling on technical viewpoints. "So let's abandon whatever we managed to achieve in our copyleft-dominated universe and convert to interoperable software on the terms of their respective communities." is certainly a natural reaction. But that some developer goals have, due to the availability of LLVM, shifted from the core position of RMS does not mean that he has become unreasonable. He is trying to bring those communities caring about similar goals back in synch with what the GNU project stands for, and in this case this requires jumping off a convenient one-way wagon that is taking off in a direction that would be out of control of the FSF and the GNU project. Just because the world chose not listening to RMS in one case does not mean it makes sense for him to run after it. Yes, this makes him less popular with people like you, but then the GNU project was never about popularity. As to not trusting where the GPL may go: the copyright assignments from the FSF are two-sided contracts and spell out quite narrow restraints for that. They have been designed with the intent to make it next to useless for big companies to take over assets of the FSF or try getting increased influence over it.
Posted Feb 9, 2014 10:22 UTC (Sun)
by Del- (guest, #72641)
[Link] (4 responses)
No, LLVM/Clang was/is about Apple wanting all the benefits of open development without committing to anything. That is some twisted view of freedom and has little to do with communities so far. LLVM/Clang is effectively an open core model for Apple, for them it is a part of xcode (they have no interest in contributing xcode to anybody afaik). There is a lot of astroturfing making wide claims about how fantastic LLVM is. Recent events tend to show that LLVM is not all it is cranked up to be. How long will contributors outside Apple wait until they just fork it for their own purposes, or just give up and do their own thing? Whether this model succeeds in the long run is an open question. Personally, I put my money on GCC. The FSF has shown a flexibility around GCC (allowing transition from C to C++, allowing official plugin solution, moving over to a modular approach) that you cannot expect from Apple unless is suites their specific needs. Apple has proven exceptionally bad at building communities, but quite good at damaging communities. I wouldn't want Apple near any open projects I care about.
> The approach taken by the GPL is to not rely on goodwill. It is a tool based on legal restrictions on reuse of software and its modifications as a whole.
I do not find this line of reasoning very useful. GPL is designed to make people contribute back, while BSD is designed to enable forking. They both rely on goodwill, you cannot really force anybody to contribute to an open project, but you can create incentives for it. That is what GPL does.
> "So let's abandon whatever we managed to achieve in our copyleft-dominated universe and convert to interoperable software on the terms of their respective communities." is certainly a natural reaction.
Some large software houses want to take advantage of an open development model without committing to what made the model successful in the first place. Moreover, they are quite deliberate on what bits to do it on (typically low level bits, run along to Apple and ask them for an open source gui to anything). This is nothing new, Apple and others have used BSD software for a long time as an alternative. The new thing today is that some of the larger software houses are willing to collaborate on BSD code. That is an interesting model, and I am curious to see what comes out of it the next decade. I do think many will learn the hard way that BSD is in most cases not about community at all, so I think your usage of the word community in your post is deceiving.
Posted Feb 9, 2014 12:47 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
That's also not new: X.Org (the X Consortium before it) operated in such a fashion for decades. This model works. Yes, some tangential development is lost and if you compare result of copyleft project and non-copyleft project with similar numbar of contributors then copyleft project is usually more advanced but then non-copyleft projects tend to attract larger number of developers (and, eventually, contributors) which means that in practice results are quite similar.
Posted Feb 9, 2014 13:25 UTC (Sun)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Posted Feb 9, 2014 16:32 UTC (Sun)
by Del- (guest, #72641)
[Link]
Indeed, thanks for reminding me.
> This model works.
Please define what you mean by "this model works". From my end of the universe it hasn't exactly been the unifying experience. Xorg itself was a fork of course, but even ignoring that for a while. How has this played out?
The graphics stack on linux has been a major pain the whole way, and I fail to see how Apple embracing xfree86 helped that even a tiny bit. Today it seems Apple want to go at it alone with its Xquartz. The BSDs of this world seems stuck with xorg, while Android made its own surface flinger, and linux-world is currently being torn apart by wayland/weston and mir.
On the low level bits linux finally had a go at it alone with KMS, leaving BSDs out in the cold. Seems it was just the right cure, and BSD is finally catching up by piggy-backing on the linux graphics stack. Who knows, maybe you will even be able to use something open other than intel graphics on BSD soon.
Is this your idea of successful collaboration? While you are at it, please enlighten us all about the terrific audio stack provided to linux through open sound system. I prefer GPL any day of the week.
Posted Feb 11, 2014 18:55 UTC (Tue)
by jsdyson (guest, #71944)
[Link]
Actually, at least the original GPL is not really about the 'community', but rather a (non-prejudicial) set of rules which requires an offer of source code TO THOSE WHO ARE GIVEN A COPY OF THE BINARIES. If there is a company which has purchased a service contract for GPLed software (often $10's of k -- outside the interest of most individual developers), that company receiving the GPLed works has no real motivation to pass on the changed source code to anyone else -- possibly given the intellectually property freely to a competitor. The GPL seems mostly to be a helpful tool for those receiving the binaries so that they can maintain the software themselves.
The idea of redistribution of new changes to the 'net' at large (to a larger development team), can be quite helpful for either BSDed or GPLed sources to be maintained by the network (the larger internet based development projects, e.g. Linux(whatever version), FreeBSD, X or whatever.) It can be quite onerous to maintain the deltas from a dynamic project, so it can be very beneficial to give back at least a significant part of add-on intellectual property so that the net at large might support it. GPLed works and BSDed works are both mostly agnostic on that point.
The GPL doesn't really force redistribution to the net at large, nor does BSD. AFIAR, there have been some licenses which require sending changes back to the owner, but such terms seem (to me) to violate personal freedom to choose to embargo or redistribution one's own invention or ideas.
John Dyson
Emacs and clang?
Emacs and clang?
The new thing today is that some of the larger software houses are willing to collaborate on BSD code.
Emacs and clang?
Emacs and clang?
Emacs and clang?