Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Eric S. Raymond:

> LLVM got off the ground because GCC, by policy, refused to provide
> interfaces that some toolmakers wanted.  Consequently, those hackers
> exercised their freedom by going around GCC rather than through it.

There might be some truth to that, but that the main LLVM contributor
is deeply unhappy about the GPL, version 3, turned out a more
important factor IMHO.  I'm not following LLVM development closely.
Are there really that many contributions from people who use Clang for
building IDEs?  (Rafael's work probably doesn't depend that much on
modularity.)  I just don't believe in claims along the lines of "if
you change X, you'll attract new contributors, producing useful
features for your users".  That almost never happens, whether it's a
good policy from a software freedom point of view or not.

And it certainly wasn't downright refusal on the GCC part, it's just
that it was (and still is) difficult to get an annotated AST
approximating the source code out of the C++ front end.

Anyway, it is difficult to pitch GCC against LLVM in terms of software
freedom because it used to be common practice among GCC developers to
sell themselves into slavery and work on what are, for all intents and
purposes, proprietary forks, and the practice probably continues today
to a lesser extent.