Re: Using of parse tree externally

[Benjamin Scherrey <scherrey at switchco dot com>]

	I'm very pleased that someone else here has a clue about freedom. Its
not freedom if some are more "free" than others.

Linus Torvalds wrote:
<snip>
> Proprietary file formats are _evil_.  And they are evil whoever creates
> them: the FSF would be extremely hypocritical if it were to claim that
> "it's not evil because it's proprietary only to non-GPL'd programs".

	This, unfortunately, seems a more commonly held belief than I'd like to
think.

<more good legal arguments snipped>
 
> The GPL notion of "freedom" works both ways, something that some people
> seem to have a hard time accepting.  True freedom means that not
> everybody has to agree.  Once somebody were to start using such a
> modified gcc, the cat would be out of the bag, and the FSF would look
> rather silly to try to suppress it.
> 
> Of course, that doesn't mean that the FSF/Cygnus/RedHat would want to
> _help_ such an effort. But look at where too much inflexibility took gcc
> a few years ago - and I hope people are less inflexible these days. I
> think the egcs split was all to the best, but making a habit of
> splitting is probably not a good idea.

	Indeed. My thinking exactly.
 
> [ That said, I pretty much agree with the FSF stance, I just think it's
>   an opinion held a bit too religiously. Generating an efficient and
>   good intermediate format is damned hard, if not impossible. So there
>   are probably good technical reasons why people don't want to go down
>   that path ]

	I dunno about the FSF stance but its been my (hopeful) opinion that the
reason this hasn't been done is because it *is* so difficult.
Unfortunately, many of the statist remarks on this subject make me
question whether that alone was the true reason. It seems many fear
competition from people using GPL'd sources and their results. If that
is true than this mindset has almost certainly stiffled the quality of
work resulting from gcc. Such tools could be used to greatly increase
the quality of output from the gcc. It seems to me that the best manner
to handle such competition is to make a better product that would be too
expensive to reproduce effectively in a proprietary manner. Isn't *that*
concept the whole thing that made Linux and gcc successful in the first
place?!?!?

	regards & later,

		Ben Scherrey