[pcwalton]

> RMS was right that compilers should be GPL licensed to prevent exactly this kind of thing (and worse things which are haven't happened yet).

The problem with this is that it wouldn't solve the problem in question: Intel would just have stuck with their old compiler backend instead of LLVM.

Besides, LLVM wouldn't have gotten investment to begin with if it were GPL licensed, since the entire reason for Apple's investment in LLVM is that it wasn't GPL. Ultimately, LLVM itself is a counterexample to RMS's theory that keeping compilers GPL can force organizations to do things: given deep enough pockets, a company can overcome that by developing non-GPL competitors.

[Beltalowda]

> Besides, LLVM wouldn't have gotten investment to begin with if it were GPL licensed. The entire reason for Apple's investment in LLVM in the first place is that it wasn't GPL.

I don't think that's the case; Apple/LLVM actually offered to sign over the copyright to the FSF, under the GPL; from https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

> The patch I'm working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment. Initially, I intend to link the LLVM libraries in from the existing LLVM distribution, mainly to simplify my work. This code is licensed under a BSD-like license [8], and LLVM itself will not initially be assigned to the FSF. If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.

The reason people worked on LLVM/clang is that GCC was (and to some degree, is) not very good in various areas, and had a difficult community making fixing those issues hard. There's a reason a lot of these newer languages like Swift, Rust, and Zig are based on LLVM and not GCC. See e.g. https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070915195203#p... for a run-down (from 2007, I'm not sure how many of these issues persist today; gcc has not stood still either of course, error messages are much better than they were in 2007 for example).

GPL3 changed things a bit; I'm not sure Lattner would have made the same offer with GPL3 around, but that was from 2005 when GPL3 didn't exist yet. But the idea that LLVM was primarily motivated by license issues doesn't seem to be the case, although it was probably seen as an additional benefit.

[bayindirh]

While clang is getting this support because it's not GPL, it's also providing a well deserved competition for GCC, and clang's presence woke the GCC devs to build a better compiler.

All in all I avoid non-GPL compilers for my code, but I'm happy that clang acted as a big (hard) foam cluebat for GCC.

In my opinion, we need a well polished GNU/GPL toolchain both to show it's possible, and provide a good benchmark to compete with. This competition is what drives us forward.

[iib]

From what I saw of him, he never said that it is impossible to build non-GPL compilers, he said that the work free software developers do should not "help" proprietary software.

So yes, he basically said that if you want to develop a proprietary compiler, it should cost you, and not take GCC as a base to freeload. Intel basing their new compilers on LLVM clearly saved them effort.