Xinuos sues IBM

Posted Apr 2, 2021 18:24 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Xinuos sues IBM by anton
Parent article: Xinuos sues IBM

> Apple probably would not have financed LLVM if GCC was under a permissive license (i.e., amenable to incorporation into a proprietary product); LLVM then might have suffered the usual fate of research projects. Apple's enmity to GPL is widely known. Conspiracy theory? I have experienced it personally: they wanted us to release Gforth under a different license.

That is how the GPL is supposed to work: It imposes a tax on proprietary hardware and software, by forcing the developer to avoid using GPL'd code. Apple decided to pay that tax. Is that wrong?

Now, the permissively-licensed alternative turning into a serious competitor to the GPL-licensed software is probably *not* what the FSF wanted, but "not having the outcome the FSF wanted" is a far cry from "evil." If the GNU people want GCC to win, then they need to actually make it a superior product. Ironically, LLVM's fully reusable IR is (or at least has been) a major product differentiator, to GCC's detriment.