From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David Kastrup Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 00:06:42 +0100 Organization: Organization?!? 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X-Received-From: 80.91.229.3 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:170035 Archived-At: "Eric S. Raymond" writes: > Richard Stallman : >> 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