Re: clang vs free software

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

> On 01/25/2014 03:02 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>
>> We don't want to make a program's entire AST available for parsing
>> because that would make it easy to extend GCC with proprietary
>> programs.
>
> It would also have made it easy to add modern features to Emacs and
> other free editors. Symbol table information is flatly inadequate
> given that in modern languages, typing information is highly
> contextual.
>
> Users will adopt tools that provide these features when FSF programs
> support these features or not. If you keep these features out of GCC,
> users will go to Clang. If you keep Clang integration out of Emacs,
> users will either maintain out-of-tree integration or (eventually)
> just fork Emacs, as the various starter-kit packages have already
> essentially done.

It has been explained to you what the rationale behind making GCC
unsuitable as a black box component of parsing solutions is: there is no
point in licensing GCC under the GPL if we pull the basic teeth the GPL
has by allowing integration into a larger whole without having to obey
the GPL.

An adequate reaction to that would be to see what technical
possibilities there are for making GCC support the use cases you have in
mind without throwing it wide open, rendering its licensing choice
useless.

Instead, you ignore the reasons you have been given and choose to throw
a tantrum.  This will not serve to achieve anything but leave everybody
more annoyed.

> Free software is great, but if nobody uses it, the entire enterprise
> is futile, sad, and ultimately irrelevant.

That's exactly the situation GCC has started with.  So why would it have
become relevant?

> How will the world be a better place when almost every every free
> operating system and free development environment is based on Clang
> and explicitly non-free derivatives are rampant?

Because there will still be a free software solution available without
the need to hope that everybody will be playing nice when extending it.

-- 
David Kastrup