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Comment by ayende | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that very much intentional on the part of GCC?

Somewhat. Stallman claims to have tried to make it modular,[0] but also that he wants to avoid "misuse of [the] front ends".[1]

The idea is that you should link the front and back ends, to prevent out-of-process GPL runarounds. But because of that, the mingling of the front and back ends ended up winning out over attempts to stay modular.

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

>> The idea is that you should link the front and back ends, to prevent out-of-process GPL runarounds.

Valid points, but also the reason people wanting to create a more modular compiler created LLVM under a different license - the ultimate GPL runaround. OTOH now we have two big and useful compilers!

Good lord Stallman is such a zealot and hypocrite. It's not open vs. closed it's mine vs. yours and he's openly declaring that he's nerfing software in order to prevent people from using it in a way he doesn't like. And refusing to talk about it in public because normal people hate that shit "misunderstanding" him.

--- From the post:

I let this drop back in March -- please forgive me.

  > Maybe that's the issue for GCC, but for Emacs the issue is to get detailed
  > info out of GCC, which is a different problem.  My understanding is that
  > you're opposed to GCC providing this useful info because that info would
  > need to be complete enough to be usable as input to a proprietary
  > compiler backend.

My hope is that we can work out a kind of "detailed output" that is enough for what Emacs wants, but not enough for misuse of GCC front ends.

I don't want to discuss the details on the list, because I think that would mean 50 messages of misunderstanding and tangents for each message that makes progress. Instead, is there anyone here who would like to work on this in detail?

He should just re-license GCC to close whatever perceived loophole, instead of actively making GCC more difficult to work with (for everyone!). RMS has done so much good, but he's so far from an ideal figure.

How in the world would you relicense GCC

Most contributions are required to assign copyright to the FSF, so it's not actually particularly open.

If the FSF is the sole copyright owner they're free to relicense it however they please, if no one else has any controlling interest of the copyright, the GPL doesn't restrict you from relicensing something you're the sole owner of (and it's doubtful there's a legal mechanism to give away rights to something you continue to own)

Again, the FSF under Stallman isn't about freedom it's about control.

"Most" is not all, and I doubt rights have been turned over since the beginning.

Either way, it would just create a GPL fork.

That sounds like Stallman wants proprietary OSS ;)

If you're going to make it hard for anyone anywhere to integrate with your open source tooling for fear of commercial projects abusing them and not ever sharing their changes, why even use the GPL license?

This is a big part of why I’ve always eschewed GPL.

When gcc was built most compilers were proprietary. Stallman wanted a free compiler and to keep it free. The GPL license is more restrictive, but it's philosophy is clear. At the end of the day the code's writer can choose if and how people are allowed to use it. You don't have to use it, you can use something else or build you own. And maybe, just maybe Linux is thriving while Windows is dying because in the Linux ecosystem everybody works together and shares, while in Windows everybody helps together paying for Satya Nadellas next yacht.

> At the end of the day the code's writer can choose if and how people are allowed to use it.

If it's free software then I can modify and use it as I please. What's limited is redistributing the modified code (and offering a service to users over a network for Afferro).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#fs-definition

Not anymore. Modularization is somewhat tangential, but for awhile Stallman did actively oppose rearchitecting GCC to better support non-free plugins and front-ends. But Stallman lost that battle years ago. AFAIU, the current state of GCC is the result of intentional technical choices (certain kinds of decoupling not as beneficial as people might think--Rust has often been stymied by lack of features in LLVM, i.e. defacto (semantic?) coupling), works in progress (decoupling ongoing), or lack of time or wherewithal to commit to certain major changes (decoupling too onerous).

Personally, I think when you are making bad technical decisions in service of legal goals (making it harder to circumvent the GPL), that's a sure sign that you made a wrong turn somewhere.

Why? When your goal is to have free software, having non-free software with better architecture won't suit you.

I would describe this more as "trying to prevent others from having non-free software if they wish to", which is a lot more questionable imo.

Some in the Free Software community do not believe that making it harder to collaborate will reduce the amount of software created. For them, you are going to get the software and the choice is just “free” or not. And they imagine that permissively license code bases get “taken” and so copyleft licenses result in more code for “the community”.

I happen to believe that barriers to collaboration results in less software for everybody. I look at Clang and GCC and come away thinking that Clang is the better model because it results in more innovation and more software that I can enjoy. Others wonder why I am so naive and say that collaborating on Clang is only for corporate shills and apologists.

You can have whatever opinion you want. I do not care about the politics. I just want more Open Source software. I mean, so do the others guys I imagine but they don’t always seem to fact check their theories. We disagree about which model results in more software I can use.

I am maybe part of the crowd you describe, but I don't disagree so much with you.

I just think, that:

> I happen to believe that barriers to collaboration results in less software for everybody.

is not a bad thing. There is absolutely no lack of supply for software. The "market" is flooded with software and most of it is shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

No argument that there is a lot of bad software.

I am not as much on the bandwagon for “there is no lack of supply for software”.

I think more software is good and the more software there is, the more good software there will be. At least, big picture.

I am ok with there being a lot of bad software I do not use just like I am ok with companies building products with Open Source. I just want more software I can use. And, if I create Open Source myself, I just want it to get used.

This argument has been had thousands of times across thousands of forums and mailing lists in the preceding decades and we're unlikely to settle it here on the N + 1th iteration, but the short version of my own argument is that the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best. That's how it got started in the first place (see the origin story about Stallman and the Printer).

Stallman's insistence that gcc needed to be deliberately made worse to keep evil things from happening ran completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre. Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked, but it didn't: it just made everyone pack up and leave for LLVM instead, which easily could've been predicted and reduced gcc's leverage over the software ecosystem. So it was user-hostile, anti-freedom behavior for no benefit.

I have no idea what you think "gcc's leverage" would be if it were a useless GPL'd core whose only actively updated front and back ends are proprietary. Turning gcc into Android would be no victory for software freedom.

> the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best

Yes?

> completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre

I can't follow your argument. You said yourself, that his point is the freedom of the *end user*, not the compiler vendor. He has no leverage on the random middle man between him and the end user other than adjusting his release conditions (aka. license).

I'm speaking here as an end user of gcc, who might want e.g. to make a nice code formatting plugin which has to parse the AST to work properly. For a long time, Stallman's demand was that gcc's codebase be as difficult, impenetrable, and non-modular as possible, to prevent companies from bolting a closed-source frontend to the backend, and he specifically opposed exporting the AST, which makes a whole bunch of useful programming tools difficult or impossible.

Whatever his motivations were, I don't see a practical difference between "making the code deliberately bad to prevent a user from modifying it" and something like Tivoization enforced by code signing. Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose.

> Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose.

...What? It's licensed under the GPL, of course you can modify the code if you find it unfit for purpose. If it weren't Free Software you might not have been able to do so as the source code might be kept from you.

> Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked

It did work, though, for 15 years or so. Maybe that was or wasn't enough to be worth it, I don't know.

Yes, the law made a wrong turn when it comes to people controlling the software on the devices they own. Free Software is an ingenious hack which often needs patching to deal with specific cases.

It is intentional to avoid non-free projects from building on top of gcc components.

I am not familiar enough with gcc to know how it impacts out-of-tree free projects or internal development.

The decision was taken a long time ago, it may be worth revisiting it.

Over the years several frontends for languages that used to be out-of-tree for years have been integrated. So both working in-tree & outside are definitely possible.

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