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Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

GCC has always been a centerpiece in the plan for the "viralization" of the GPL, and support for its role in this plan has always driven design decisions in GCC. This policy has caused a lot of headaches even just within the free software community (eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/343608/).

I can't find a citation for this at the moment, but RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time.

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...RMS has said on several occasions that GCC has to be difficult to integrate into other tools just for the sake of pushing the GPL. For example, this was his explanation for why improvements to GCC's intermediate representation formats (GIMPLE and friends) were refused for a long time.

Weird. Though not as bad as the worst of Microsoft's shenanigans, this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FSF complains about proprietary software vendors pulling.

> this strikes me as in the same class of uncivil moves that the FSF complains about proprietary software vendors pulling

Why? Did you buy a copy of GCC?

Making your software hard to interface with is making it less open. It's the same sort of move as making your word processor use an incompletely documented binary format.

> Making your software hard to interface with is making it less open

We are using two different definitions of "open". Back in the 80's Unix was considered "open" because you could compile a program for various flavors and the various flavors could share data on the same network (contrary to other platforms of the time). GCC is open not because it runs on many platforms, but because you can freely inspect, change it and redistribute it. Those are two completely different meanings.

These are both important. Sometimes the letter of the law is convenient. Needing to resort to the letter of the law is not "open" -- a 3rd meaning!

It makes some sense if you view it from the perspective of users rather than developers. The FSF comes from the perspective of being interested in what rights/freedoms end users have to modify software they receive, which takes precedence over other concerns. So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that end users aren't allowed to hack is bad.

But if end users are hacking stuff, then they are also developers. Replace "end users" with "developers" and it gets interesting:

"So basically anything that would make it easier for developers to ship stuff that developers aren't allowed to hack is bad."

So making it hard to hack X for people trying to make Y hard to hack is okay. Seems a bit weird.

Weird but plausible...

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