I think the biggest hurdle to people caring about copyleft is the sheer tonnage of disrespect people like RMS show to others. Nobody wants to work with a curmudgeon.
RMS doesn't have a problem with LLVM because it's bad, he has a problem with it because it's good.
> the biggest hurdle to people caring about copyleft is the sheer tonnage of disrespect people like RMS show to others
No, the biggest hurdles to people caring about copyleft are by far the incompatibilities with accepted practices and existing software that make it a lot of work to comply with copyleft ideals.
RMS's tone never seemed disrespectful to me. Uncompromising and occasionally blunt, yes, but never disrespectful. What would you have had him do differently? Compromise his ideals? Spin out a comforting but insincere apology that focused on licensing technicalities rather than the underlying philosophical issues?
I think there's a big problem with copyright and software -- the goal of copyright is to provide public goods, but the public goods that copyright protects is the source code, not the binary, yet there are no guarantees that the public will ever get the source code. I think if this problem were addressed (e.g. all software that seeks copyright protection must have its source code placed in escrow) then a lot of RMS's legitimate issues with closed source software would be mitigated. I'm sure he would still resent code being closed source, but at least we'd know that in 25 years or whatever the source code would become available to all.
He never said that, and you're really failing to see his point. He doesn't want GCC to be broken up into tiny bits and have each of those pieces replaced by non-copyleft equivalents. Because he doesn't want the hard work of the GCC community to be used as a scaffold for creating a non-free replacement.
He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from GPL'ed software in all the ways the license permits. He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from non-free open source software (like Klang) however they like.
He also has no problem with people forking GCC and splitting it up however they want to. He doesn't think that's a good use of resources, and he thinks it's harmful, but he has no interest in stopping them.
What is is not happy for, and what he is standing up against, is companies making changes to his branch of GCC. The GNU project is a group of people maintaining their versions of various Free Software. You can fork any of those projects and make different choices. But within the context of that project, amongst his collaborators he has opinions about what changes to make, and how best to further the goals of the project. And he thinks this change will be bad for the project.
Well it is. There are a finite number of consumers of C++ compilers. He is competing for the attention of potential free software advocates.
The only code that helps us and not our adversaries is copylefted code.
I would have him not view people on the other side as advisaries. Sure FreeBSD and Konquer didn't gain much from Apple deciding to use their code, but they also didn't lose anything either. It isn't a zero sum game.
I disagree.
In fact, I think the GPL probably saved the World Wide Web.
That Konquerer was GPL was the single advantage it had over anything else. It used to be a buggier, and slower, and generally worse web browser, but every time someone made an improvement, the GPL made those improvements Free; When Apple improved it, it was the GPL forced them to make those changes available to everyone else, and while the code being available is what helped Google start their web browser, it was the GPL that fed those improvements back into the community.
Perhaps Mozilla (open source, but not GPL) would have remained an acceptable way to search wikipedia, but I struggle to believe it would become good enough to be embedded in nearly every operating system and WWW-capable device.
This is simply not true, and if it were, you'd be implying that Apple chose Konquerer over Mozilla because they preferred GPL to MPL. In reality, Konquerer had a much cleaner architecture that Apple thought they had a better chance of adapting to OS X.
The GPL had nothing to do with any of these events, the key feature was open source, not GPL. And if Apple had not turned Konquerer into a first-class user agent, Mozilla still would have had a first class open source user agent.
I think the web is one place where the GPL has demonstrated that GPL is not a key desirable feature in open platforms. GPL has had remarkably little to do with any of the web, as it is only used in one of three major user agents, and in almost none of the web-specific server stack.
Actually, that's completely irrelevant.
The GPL ensured that Google could benefit from Apple's decision to use KHTML.
That's the only thing making them do it.
Whether there are other benefits to giving away source code is not relevant. What they might have done is not relevant. No one could ever say whether Apple and Google and Samsung would have gotten together and made a web browser in collaboration without the GPL.
The fact is that they did not do it without the GPL.
In reality KHTML was a much better code base than other options, and Apple didn't really care that much about the license.
Let me tie in this comment with the whole thing about GPL vs. non-copyleft free software drama in general, and why I think GPL has become harmful: what you said I think illustrates a kind of thinking mode that the idea, the practical working principle, behind GPL breeds. The idea is to use force and coercion to make entities do what you want them to do. That road naturally leads to a mindset where every behavior is seen as necessarily motivated by coercion. And that leads one to normalize and accept coercion as an acceptable, even necessary, mode of social relations. I see this mode of thinking a lot with strong advocates of GPL. It's always in terms of someone being forced to do something good, and if they aren't being forced no good shall come out. This is a horrible, horrible way to look at the world. If we take Apple as an example, they open-sourced a lot of stuff they had no legal reason to release, some of those things very non trivial.
I have to point out that I'm writing all of this as someone who respects RMS and FSF's cause a great deal, I even use the term free software rather than open source (in my native language, fortunately, there's no confusion about "free", free as in freedom and free as in bear are not homonyms). However, I do not think GPL and strong copyleft licenses are an acceptable, or even a good way, to accomplish freedom in this domain of life. GPL is maybe a great tool to destroy proprietary software (well, almost, but not quite), but a horrible way to accomplish software freedoms in general.
It's always better to encode, into law, ethical behaviour we want, instead of hoping for it from people. Doubly so when the 'person' is a corporation.
People can and did extend Mozilla, and they can and did keep those changes non-free because the MPL allows for non-free linking and binary-only redistribution.
While the GPL does not.
"Competitor that through their marketplace success makes us further from our social goal" doesn't have all the same connotations as "advisory", but given their goals I don't see how it's not an accurate descriptor.
No, the software marketplace isn't a zero sum game. I'm not even a believer in free software, but it still frustrates me to no end when someone says "not a zero sum game" in a conversation that is so obviously about market share.
People who threatens others with lawsuit for doing modification or sharing are adversaries to RMS. For example, he seems to dislike Apple because they threatens jailbreakers with million dollar lawsuits and jail, and do not want his code to contribute to that misery.
A big part of the impetus for the FSF was an early instance where they were adversaries, at least in RMS's eyes. The MIT AI lab had an open culture of sharing code, which was "taken proprietary" by several spinoffs in the early 1980s, who hired away some of the AI-lab hackers and stopped sharing improvements with the remaining not-hired-away AI-lab hackers. Stallman saw that as a bit of a betrayal of trust, not to mention damaging to the open development of software, and users' ability to have the source to & freedom to modify their software.
His solution was twofold: 1) start his own competing spinoff (the Free Software Foundation) which would employ its own set of hackers to develop the "public", non-proprietary codebase; and 2) license their contributions under a new license, the GPL, which would ensure that extensions to their code couldn't be taken proprietary.
I know, programmers are supposed to be emotionless meritocratic robots, but this Old Boys Know Best attitude is precisely why RMS and GCC is losing user share so quickly these days: the extremist meritocracy of programming culture is actually highly male-centric, and it simply scares off all women and any men who are not sexists.
This is why LLVM is gaining so much support these days: it's technically superior, and its development community isn't sexist.
If you actually read what RMS just wrote, or, for that matter, anything RMS has written in the last decade on similar subjects, it's clear that "losing user share" isn't a meaningful metric to the FSF. If you lose user share by strengthening non-free software, then there was no point to the FSF to begin with.
By starting your comment with "the problem with RMS", you might as well be pointing out "the problem with free software". Which, fair enough, but it's not like people didn't realize that non-free software could edge out free software on functionality or user-friendliness.
Who said it was bad? People have said it is not copyleft.
I think the biggest hurdle to people caring about copyleft is the sheer tonnage of disrespect people like RMS show to others. Nobody wants to work with a curmudgeon.
I think that's ridiculous. Do you really think corporate backers of LLVM would just ignore their economic incentives for a non-copyleft compiler if RMS was friendlier?
RMS.
> People have said it is not copyleft.
RMS says that it is bad because it is not copyleft. Specifically, he says "The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers".
Do you not think that "terrible setback for our community" is a subset of "bad"?
The other part of my comment still stands, though (I think).
> If LLVM is so bad why are the people who make it so much easier to work with?
How is the license being bad influenced by, or of influence on, the attitude of the developers? Are you saying that surely the license can't be that bad, since the software is written by nice folks?
Don't judge a book by its cover. Follow the money. A witty saying proves nothing.
Are bears catholic?
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.tcl/7JXGt-...
Actually, he does. I remember when he went to an OpenBSD list a few years ago[1] and insisted they take out ports for non-free software out of the ports tree.
[1]: Too lazy to find the link.