Apple has a history with gcc.

Posted Feb 19, 2015 6:59 UTC (Thu) by cas (guest, #52554)
In reply to: Apple has a history with gcc. by k8to
Parent article: Emacs and LLDB

no ambiguity intended or exploited. I (thought i) was pointing out that there's intransigence on both sides, not just RMS.

I'm far more concerned about Apple's intentions with LLVM's licensing, and RMS's "intransigence" is, as i mentioned, no surprise - he's been both open and consistent about his goals and motivations for decades. more to the point here, his stance is that software freedom is the end goal, and neither features nor convenience nor technological advantage are sufficient reason to divert from that goal.

IMO he's right - you're better off choosing free software over proprietary software even if the proprietary software is significantly better. and, in the long run, you're better off choosing free software that advances the cause of software freedom over open source software that does nothing for that cause or has licensing issues - and corporate history - that actively work against it.

Apple has a history with gcc.

Posted Feb 21, 2015 20:46 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not at all sold on free software as always better as a universal truth. It's not hard for me to poke holes in this theory, like pointing to some entertainment software. However it seems pretty obviously beneficial for infrastructure like debuggers.

But I don't feel at all convinced that copyleft over noncopyleft infrastructure is necessarily better. noncopyleft is sometimes more readily adopted, which can advance the cause of software freedom. copyleft is more resilient to co-option, which can advance the cause of software freedom.

If it's necessarily better to select copylefted software, then I guess I should write everything in Pike, because all the other languages have open specifications with non-copylefted and/or propriatary implementations or a single noncopylefted implementation.

Apple has a history with gcc.

Posted Mar 1, 2015 2:46 UTC (Sun) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link]

I didn't say that free software is always better, i said you're better off choosing free software over proprietary software.

that's because freedom is a benefit that transcends software quality. there are many cases where proprietary software is better quality and/or has more features than comparable free software - but free software allows you to do things that you can not legally or practically do with proprietary software.

similarly copyleft software has the advantage over non-copyleft free sw that it actively promotes and enhances the cause of free software for everyone - with the only restriction being that you can't restrict the freedom of others to do whatever they want with the software or derivative works.