Why does good things coming from another license mean GPL isn't working? GPL guarantees a lot of rights that an important minority of developers finds valuable . If you don't care for it, Im not here to convince you, but I think you should be glad it at least exists.
You are right -- the GPL has been enormously important to the free software movement. I (perhaps wrongly) interpreted your post as being anti-permissive more than pro-copyleft. My apologies!
The existence of LLVM means that GCC's GPL can't really guarantee anything anymore. 20 years ago we got an open-source objective-C compiler because its implementers wanted to reuse GCC's backend. But today a company in the same situation would just use the LLVM backend.
And that, along with FSF's earlier refusal to accept patches to let gcc build for the Mac, may be the reason LLVM got the support it did. Two egotistical jerks butt heads, and then one of them found a billion dollars at his fingertips.
So the reason for that was that Apple was of the legal opinion that GPLed software was incompatible with their OS.
Since they didn't have process boundaries at the time, all code running on the system, even the OS was basically linked together in a big blob. Apple thought (incorrectly) that allowing any GPL software would mean that they had to GPL their OS, and were vehemently anti free software.
I think under those conditions, the FSF's boycott was fair.
Do you have any source for that? I found a post[0] on Slashdot from March 2000 that Apple "plans to assign the copyright for its changes to gcc to the [FSF]." Neither the post nor the comments I skimmed seem to make reference to a victorious GPL lawsuit. (Unfortunately the original mailing list post is lost.)
The earliest snapshot[1] of opensource.apple.com on the Internet Archive suggests that the compiler sources were available (under "cc") as of October 12, 2000.
Although that snapshot suggests the first release was version cc-792, I can't find older than cc-798 on the site today. But the NOTES file[2] is interesting, detailing NeXT's/Apple's earlier changes including release codenames. (3/19/97: "This is the first fully functional compiler for the PowerPC.")
I would guess that the earliest Apple shipped gcc was with ProjectBuilder in the Mac OS X Developer Preview which was in 1999. Maybe things start to get blurry with NeXT, WebObjects, etc. but it doesn't _seem_ like Apple was shirking it's responsibilities under the GPL.
Ok, so I misremembered, it didn't get to the point of a full lawsuit, only lawyers sending increasingly nasty notes at eachother, but it's still the first GPL enforcement action.
Its was NextStep. They tried for a long time to ship a proprietary GCC, then a proprietary frontend with the rest of gcc, then finally backed down and released the frontend. This was all in the early nineties.
I see. I was just using Nvidia’s CUDA compiler and it seems to be similar—-a combination of a proprietary frontend based on EDG and gcc to produce actual binaries.
If GCC had been more permissively licensed then Apple would not have released its Objective C compiler, which would have been a worse situation for everyone involved (to include Apple: they are simply wrong that a proprietary compiler is better for them).
GPL tries to make the world better, by increasing the free software commons. BSD tries to be neutral, but one should not be neutral in a war of good vs. evil: (cf. Ireland, Spain, Sweden & Switzerland in the Second World War or Sweden during the Cold War).
No it's essentially saying if projects like GCC published permissively we could all get along peacefully and wouldn't need to batter each other using the courts.