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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, the leverage did work, just not forever. It was a play with a limited lifetime. It didn't necessarily need to shake out that way, probably if GCC was slightly easier to write for but not too easy people would have invested more. It took a major investment to create a competing product.

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I thought GPLv3 adoption by GCC was what really lit the flames on moving to llvm by commercial entities?

You might know this history better than me.

you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that. Just running gcc does not create a GPLv3 infection. And glibc et al are library licensed so they don't infect what you build either, most especially if you are not modifying its source and rebuilding it.

Still some companies try hard to avoid GPLv3, see Apple, who either provide old GPLv2 licensed software or invest in BSD/MIT replacements.

And what we've seen from e.g. Apple is that "make a private fork and only distribute binaries" is exactly what they wanted the whole time.

you only need to worry about GPLv3 if you are modifying gcc in source and building it and distributing that.

That's the context here. If you build a new compiler based on GCC, GPL applies to you. If you build a new compiler based on LLVM it doesn't.

the context here doesn't actually specify whether we are talking about companies using llvm sources to create proprietary compilers (or maybe integrated with a proprietary IDE) or using llvm to quickly bootstrap and craft a compiler for a new processor, new language, etc., where they will distribute the source to the compiler anyway

but such a compiler or IDE would not GPLv3 infect it's users' target sources and binaries.

The main problem with GPLv3 specifically from the perspective of various commercial vendors is the patent clause.

GCC has come a long way in terms of features and complexity since the 90's/00's when Stallman made these decisions. Today, building a compiler from scratch would be a huge undertaking, and would be prohibitively expensive for most organizations regardless of licensing.

If the requirement was still just to implement a "simple" C89 compliant compiler, and I was worried about software freedom. The GPL is probably still a good bet.

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