TechView: Linus Torvalds, Inventor of Linux (Huffington Post)

Posted May 27, 2014 12:27 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: TechView: Linus Torvalds, Inventor of Linux (Huffington Post) by khim
Parent article: TechView: Linus Torvalds, Inventor of Linux (Huffington Post)

Just to be clear, you're talking here about situations where there is a proprietary extension (not "exception") to GCC being used.

If you don't use proprietary extensions to GCC when you create your binary then the program is not subject to the GPL, as we've been discussing.

And yes, one of the main goals of the exception clause (the reason it's so complicated) is that the FSF wants to specifically not allow (or at least make infeasible) using proprietary extensions with GCC. If you want to add proprietary extensions to your compiler then by all means, you should be using LLVM. I believe this is a loss for free software, but obviously others disagree.