[justinmeiners]

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.

[umanwizard]

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!

[justinmeiners]

makes sense, I like permissive licenses too.

[lmm]

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.

[pjmlp]

Except with LLVM they wouldn't need to return their work to GCC, like NeXT was forced to do with their frontend.

[lmm]

That's exactly my point. GCC's copyleft was only effective when there wasn't a viable permissive-licensed alternative.