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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of how to not steer a FOSS project. Seriously, what was the steering committee thinking? I mean, I tend to agree with this decision, but do they honestly believe that just announcing such a big change without any public discussion beforehand is going to fly?

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This doesn't change anything for anybody except the copyright holder (who, if you've signed a copyright assignment statement, is not you). They're allowing contributors to maintain copyright over code submitted to GNU projects, and if you want to assign copyright to the FSF, you still can. The COS (a form of CLA) still grants the FSF the right to redistribute the code under GPLv3, so it doesn't affect users, either. I don't really know what a public consultation would have done here.

Just follow the thread in the gcc mailing list. There are loads of questions now which need to be answered, just to name a few:

- Can the steering committee make that decision?

- Can the code be still easily(!) re-licensed to a possible GPLv4?

- How can code later be re-licensed to GPL with runtime library exception or to LGPL?

- Who should be named as copyright holder?

It might very well be that all these questions can be easily answered, but that should have happened before.

Because almost always the employer owns their employees work product, you're going to end up with large swaths of GCC code having various megacorps being the exclusive copyright holder; potentially creating even more opportunities for Oracle v. Google like litigation over compliance minutia regarding code that is supposed to be freely available.

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.

> 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

Again: I tend to agree with this decision, but that's not the way to do this.

There isn't any other way to do it. FSF showed their hand and lost.

> 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.

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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