Re: Licence of ts-comint

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

>>>>> "RS" == Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

RS> If LLVM were GPL'd -- or if it did not exist -- nVidia would have had to
RS> use a GPL'd starting point, would have had to make its version free, would
RS> have had to reveal the GPU's instruction set -- which would have been a
RS> great and important victory for freedom.

Not necessarily. nVidia has enough money they could write their own backends
from scratch, which would mean users losing out on all the research that's
gone into LLVM, any chance of compatibility with standard tools, etc.

No company with sufficient resources is forced to participate in free
software, and saying that a world full of GPL'd compilers would push them in
that direction is incorrect, I believe. Without free software, we would simply
descend into further fragmentation, lack of interoperability, and no chance at
all to benefit from the work of others.

I think the GPL ultimately ends up pushing companies in that direction,
whereas Open Source better allows for the free flow of ideas (by not
necessarily require that the implementations of those ideas be free). In my
own company, for example, we can never use GPL libraries, because they carry
too much legal burden to be worth it. Instead, we reach for Open Source
libraries; and, if none exist, spend money to write our own.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2