[marcan_42]

There's also this issue by FSF director Ian Kelling:

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781

Honestly, it sounds like they're deeply scared of long-standing FSF-backed software having to compete (or even be replaced) with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL (e.g. they have similar thoughts on LLVM/clang), to the point where they decide to troll the issue trackers. It feels really childish.

[josefx]

> with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL (e.g. they have similar thoughts on LLVM/clang)

LLVM/clang is worse than just GPL, as far as I understand the design of GCC is intentionally horribly bad to make it painful to integrate with a proprietary tool chain. Of course this means that things like refactoring support end up being basically impossible to build on GCC, so people move to clang out of necessity.

[marcan_42]

It's both a technical issue and a political issue; RMS himself has repeatedly advocated against interfaces that would expose internal representations that GCC uses because they could be used to build proprietary add-ons.

These days GCC does have a plugin interface, but they came up with a really funny hack to try to stop people from using proprietary plugins. Programs compiled with gcc can require linking with libgcc, and the libgcc license is "GPL, except it doesn't apply to software compiled with GCC and all-Free plugins". So their idea is that if you add a proprietary plug-in to GCC, that makes all code compiled like that have to be GPLed instead.

It is, of course, questionable whether this hack would hold up in court. It is also rather useless, because it's not hard to reimplement enough of libgcc to make it work. For example, the Linux kernel only links with libgcc for a few architectures.

[Joker_vD]

Something something those who give up software freedom for software's usefulness deserve neither something something.

[josephcsible]

> Honestly, it sounds like they're deeply scared of long-standing FSF-backed software having to compete (or even be replaced) with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL

They are, for good reason. Big companies hate open source, despite their claims to the contrary. Look at Apple's proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff, and handset manufacturers' proprietary forks of Android. The FSF should absolutely be doing everything in their power to minimize how often this happens.

[marcan_42]

That's an argument you can certainly make. Unfortunately for them, as it turns out, deciding licenses for other projects is not in their power, and trolling other projects' issue trackers is counter-productive to the goal of convincing them change their license.

[user-the-name]

> Look at Apple's proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff

What forks of what stuff?

[GhettoComputers]

OS X, Darwin off the top of my head

[marcan_42]

https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-115.html

Here's the kernel, including all the BSD stuff:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-7195.141.2/

You can compile it yourself and run macOS with your own kernel build. Here's a blog by Apple's head of XNU development explaining how that works:

https://kernelshaman.blogspot.com/2021/02/building-xnu-for-m...

[GhettoComputers]

Yeah and the open source people gave up, it’s like giving you a free recipe for a beef Wellington in a world they control of food. Nothing uses Darwin besides Apple

[user-the-name]

And? The source is there. There is no requirement to do extra work to make it useful for anyone but yourself. They did not even need to release the source, but they did.

You made a claim about "proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff". The kernel is open source. The rest of the OS is written from scratch by Apple, and originally by NeXT, and is not a fork of anything.

Are you standing by your original claim?