Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by epistasis 3776 days ago
It seems that the key part of your source is:

>In order to circumvent the terms of the GPL, NeXT had originally intended to ship the Objective-C frontend separately, allowing the user to link it with GCC to produce the compiler executable. After being initially accepted by Richard M. Stallman, this plan was rejected after Stallman consulted with GNU's lawyers and NeXT agreed to make Objective-C part of GCC.[7]

Given that both NeXT and Stallman changed their minds on this issue, I'm not sure that you can argue that Objective-C would not have eventually been open sourced. Especially given Clang.

I'm not sure why you perceive that I think that GPL is not Open Source. Quite the contrary. I'm basically arguing that "Free" software misses the point of open source software. Which is in counter to these very well known opinions:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.h...

And primarily I object to Stallman's hijacking of the term "free" where the only thing I see is control.