Runtime library license, was Re: Apple-employed maintainers (was Re: Apple, iPhone, and GPLv3 troubles)

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> NightStrike <nightstrike@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> There is a simple technique which anybody is free to use to make this
>>> happen much faster: make a large donation to the SFLC and/or the FSF,
>>> contingent on this issue being finished.  In the absence of that, it
>>> will happen in the time that people have available to work on it.
>> How large is large?
> 
> More than you want to pay personally.  Think: enough to hire another
> staff member to work on it.
> 
> To be clear, I'm not saying it won't get done.  It will get done.  But
> it is in effect like any other volunteer job.  Our position with
> regard to the people who need to do the work is like a gcc user's
> position with regard to us.


I fully understand that position, but it triggers another question: what 
company (or kind of companies) would want GCC plugins to happen really fast?

Is there any big coorporation, already contributing to GCC, which needs 
plugin quickly? I cannot name any.

My feeling is that plugin will become progressively extremely useful to 
*new* companies, which are not yet working within GCC. This mostly is 
the case because in my perception plugins will open new use of GCC, like 
illustrated by the "replacing sed & grep by gcc" papers from Mozilla 
folks (Tarek et al.). My intuition is that plugins will mostly enhance 
all the non-code-generation activities in GCC.

Big hardware companies (those traditionally investing in GCC, like 
Intel, AMD, Apple, ...) probably do not need plugins (except if they 
wanted to provide *proprietary* plugins, which I believe the next 
runtime license will try to prohibit), they can and do contribute to GCC 
inside.

Big software or services companies (IBM, Google) probably also don't 
need plugins (except to enhance GCC with a plugin that they use only in 
house and do not intend to distribute, but for that use an inhouse 
patched GCC is enough).

So I cannot guess a company willing to invest big bucks on the runtime 
license issue, but I am probably wrong (and not naive enough to believe 
that companies will discuss their GCC related strategies & motivations 
here, publicly, on this list).

Regards
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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