RE: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[<Gerald dot Williams at infineon dot com>]

Joe Buck wrote:
> RMS believes that people who extend GCC, hoping to take their
extensions
> proprietary, and then finding that they can't, will then just decide
to
> contribute the code, if it is useful, since otherwise they can't
> distribute and have to support it by themselves forever, or else they
have
> to risk legal problems.  And he has some evidence that this sometimes
> happens (C++, Objective-C, many contributed back ends).  So the intent
> isn't to prevent certain people from using it, but to have those
people
> contribute the changes back even if that isn't their preference.
> 
> Now that's fine as far as it goes, but when it becomes a defense
> of an opaque, non-extendable architecture we have a problem.

Agreed. It can also make it harder to contribute changes back, thus
possibly precluding some contributions.

-Jerry