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by monocasa 2292 days ago
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.
1 comments
rgovostes 2292 days ago
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.
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monocasa 2291 days ago
It's different, NVCC emits C code, then invokes a version of GCC on that code for the local system.

NextStep was trying to link a new frontend at the same level as C, C++, or Fortran, and just give the middle finger to the terms of the GPL.

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