Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:

> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>:
>>                 What the developers of LLVM are doing is foolish given
>> that we already had GCC:
>
> 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.
>
> That may lead to an outcome you don't like, but they could with
> precisely equal justification call *you* foolish for crippling GCC by
> policy.

Shrug.  The whole point of the GPL is "crippling by policy", preventing
reuse in proprietary software and thus also affecting legitimate uses in
Free Software.  You can call people foolish who submit themselves to
chemotherapy, because it is making them sick and lets their hair fall
out.  Yes, there are adverse consequences.  But pretending there are no
desired consequences is disingenuous.

> Generally, if you use the term "foolish" for people who are acting
> intelligently to pursue their own objectives rather than yours, you
> will mislead yourself and not affect them at all.

The GPL is a legal tool working by coercion.  It's purpose is to
preclude people thwarting the objectives of free software when making
use of it.  There is no problem with people pursuing different
objectives having to use different tools: the GPL has been designed to
only help those who are willing to accept certain objectives.

Things go wrong only When those _sharing_ the common objectives don't
make use of GCC.  There may be several reasons for that.  And "we are
for free software, but proprietary software does pose no danger to our
goals" is the one that is foolish.

A significant number of Clang developers have worked on Clang because
the restrictions and/or the design of GCC did not meet their goals,
without caring particularly for free software or copyleft.  That GCC did
not meet their requirements may have been partly by design.

The foolishness comes more by those who embrace Clang as being under a
"more free" license than GCC.  Clang development is significantly driven
by proprietary interests, and quite a bit of code that makes use of it
is not getting contributed back.  Supporting the parts of the
infrastructure required to keep things like proprietary compilers for
GPUs running means work without gain.

An extreme case of that was the OpenDarwin project.  They basically were
doing free development work for Apple, with Apple not giving them
anything useful in return, dragging their feet in providing them with
the code that they maintained without anything useful coming from it
that would not have been behind proprietary walls.  After several years
of increasingly disenfranchising and downright condescending behavior by
Apple, OpenDarwin closed shop.

If you let those running the monetized part of the show set the rules,
that's what comes out quite often.  It's basically a microcosmic version
of the U.S. government which makes its decisions based on the flow of
lobbyist payments.  The actual bulk of the total money spent comes from
taxpayers, but the direction where it flows is set by those bribing the
switchguards, the politicians.  Creating and supporting a system that
takes the controls from those actually keeping it running is foolish by
those that hand off control voluntarily to people not serving the same
interests.

-- 
David Kastrup