After viewing this link, I think RMS might not be seeing the big picture here. There isn't merely an attack on GCC, but rather an attack on Free Software itself.
HN has proven for the past few years that the valley is less in-tune with individual freedom than they are with corporate-compatible licenses. This has understandably created some disconnect and often friction between us. but regardless, stay with me on my reasoning.
within a three month window, we have seen:
* a downright (successful) coup by systemd, which is an RPC backdoor for proprietary corporate software to bypass GPL restrictions via trivial bits of LGPL'ed code, wrapped in the controversial plan to swallow the GNU toolchain whole.
* very real talks about (GPL'd) GCC being replaced by (BSD Licensed) LLVM, followed by the peanut gallery using this as an example of the inferior quality of the GPL.
* an outright attack on the GPL, using the slimiest sound bytes and half-truths, for not being corporate-compatible.
Call me a conspiracy theorist (Literally: one who has a proven hypothesis about a group of people working together to commit a crime), but in the eighteen years I've been running linux, I've never seen this large an effort to sway people from using Free Software before. And no, I haven't forgotten about SCO v. IBM[0], "Get The Facts" campaign, or Halloween Documents I and II[1].
It would be easy to make a case for Microsoft, still being run by Steve Ballmer[2], as the culprit. But Apple and Cisco (and Red Hat, post-CentOS purchase) are not very good players in the GPL sandbox, and we can't exactly rule them out. All I know is I see a pattern, and, Confirmation Bias notwithstanding, I'll keep talking about it if these sort of articles continue getting frontpaged on HN.
HN has proven for the past few years that the valley is less in-tune with individual freedom than they are with corporate-compatible licenses. This has understandably created some disconnect and often friction between us. but regardless, stay with me on my reasoning.
within a three month window, we have seen:
* a downright (successful) coup by systemd, which is an RPC backdoor for proprietary corporate software to bypass GPL restrictions via trivial bits of LGPL'ed code, wrapped in the controversial plan to swallow the GNU toolchain whole.
* very real talks about (GPL'd) GCC being replaced by (BSD Licensed) LLVM, followed by the peanut gallery using this as an example of the inferior quality of the GPL.
* an outright attack on the GPL, using the slimiest sound bytes and half-truths, for not being corporate-compatible.
Call me a conspiracy theorist (Literally: one who has a proven hypothesis about a group of people working together to commit a crime), but in the eighteen years I've been running linux, I've never seen this large an effort to sway people from using Free Software before. And no, I haven't forgotten about SCO v. IBM[0], "Get The Facts" campaign, or Halloween Documents I and II[1].
It would be easy to make a case for Microsoft, still being run by Steve Ballmer[2], as the culprit. But Apple and Cisco (and Red Hat, post-CentOS purchase) are not very good players in the GPL sandbox, and we can't exactly rule them out. All I know is I see a pattern, and, Confirmation Bias notwithstanding, I'll keep talking about it if these sort of articles continue getting frontpaged on HN.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies...
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I...
2. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-stil...