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by knz_ 1838 days ago
Well, this is a problem that FSF created. They tried to unilaterally appoint RMS to the steering committee and were forced to renege when most of GCC's top contributors threatened to walk away from the project.

If they didn't get rid of the copyright aggreement there would have just been a fork or those people would have gone to work on other projects.
2 comments
javagram 1837 days ago
> Well, this is a problem that FSF created. They tried to unilaterally appoint RMS to the steering committee and were forced to renege when most of GCC's top contributors threatened to walk away from the project.

Do you have a source for this? The story appears to be the opposite - RMS was on the steering committee list since 2012 and was removed earlier this year by the rest of the steering committee as a reaction to RMS being put back as a FSF board member. https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

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deng 1838 days ago
Again: I tend to agree with this decision, but that's not the way to do this.
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knz_ 1838 days ago
There isn't any other way to do it. FSF showed their hand and lost.
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deng 1838 days ago
> There isn't any other way to do it.

You cannot discuss things like this beforehand? You cannot do an RFD in the mailing list to gather feedback and questions? Even the announcement is sloppily written, because it sounds like gcc will now be licensed under GPLv3 exclusively (and not GPLv3+). This was later corrected in the thread, but confusion like this could have easily been avoided.

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edelsohn 1837 days ago
The most current version of the GPL is GPL v3.0. GCC specifically and somewhat controversially updated to GPLv3 when it was released. The version of the license that applies to GCC is GPL v3.0. There is no mythical GPL v3.1 or GPL v4.0.

The announcement specifically stated that GCC "will continue to be developed, distributed, and licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0." Until there is a revised license the "or later" is moot. One does not "continue" a policy that is a change in policy.

If this is the biggest complaint about the announcement, I think that the GCC SC did an excellent job.

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