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Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)
On Apr 26, 2010, at 1:53 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> Beyond that, the changes to support Objective C 2.0 (and later) have
>> never been merged back in, despite being published and widely
>> available under the GPL. Also, the GNU runtime and the NeXT
>> runtimes are wildly incompatible, and the ObjC frontend in GCC is
>> one of the most disliked (I'll leave out the pejoratives :) because
>> its design has not kept up with the other front-ends.
>>
>> Even in the shining example of the GPL succeeding, are you sure it
>> was a good thing in retrospect? :)
>
> That is due to a different set of other factors. Objective C is not a
> shining example of the GPL succeeding. But it is an example of a case
> where the GPL forced release of code *and* it was contributed to gcc,
> which is exactly the case that you were skeptical of.
>
> In other words: theory says one thing will happen ("GPL encourages
> [FSF] software to fork"); history shows that a different thing
> happened. I'm a pragmatist; given a reasonable choice, I prefer
> history over theory.
Heh, ok, but if you're looking for history, look at both sides of it.
<deleted>
I wrote a long and detailed email about GCC forks, long term corporate branches, the impact of the GPL on all this, etc. However, it is so off topic, I'm happy to just delete it and drop the issue :-)
-Chris