| >What I find very strange though is that some people seemingly want one of these projects to die. I'm not sure which side you were addressing here, so I'll cover both Stallman wants the LLVM project to die for political reasons (he described it as "a terrible setback for our community" [1]). His argument is basically that LLVM can be used by non-free software, so it's mere existence is negative for the world because it enables non-free software. Also obviously it takes away resources that could have gone to improving GCC (although in my opinion a lot of them wouldn't for the reason below). It's an extreme argument, but it's the kind of extreme position Stallman has consistently taken so it's not surprising. On the other side, one of the problems people have with GCC is that it's run by people who actively want to make worse software for political reasons. i.e. they'd rather software not support something at all if supporting it might benefit non-free software. That's fair enough, but it shouldn't be a surprise when users of the software prefer to use and support a project that isn't deliberately designed to make doing certain tasks very difficult. Academics and other people with an interest in hacking on compilers were obviously going to prefer a project that wasn't architected to try and prevent the very kinds of things they were doing. The opposition to refactoring tools for emacs based on GCC is the most recent (2015) example of this[2], but the problem is a long standing one. Fundamentally people want to use compilers to do more sophisticated things with their code than just compile it, and that is seen as being incompatible with the political goals of the GCC project. [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... and the rest of that thread |
Well, for an end user those 'political' reasons are often practical benefits.
Having features only available as proprietary add-ons or through proprietary forks, or being locked out of running the code of your choice on hardware you've bought, are things I find very unappealing.
Of course there are downsides with copyleft as well, because there is no perfect solution to this problem.
Personally I'm favoring permissive licensing for projects where there is little or no incentive for commercial proprietary forks, and copyleft for projects where there is (typically end user targeted).