While the BSD licensing model allows various hijinks to go around without the requirement of disclosure.
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization). Then again, you probably would rather throw some ad hominem at me regarding a certain GPL advocate.
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization).
I haven't heard Apple complaining about the GPL or trying to circumvent it - they're just switching to alternative projects.
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits.
This is symptomatic of PHB/MBA thinking: short term gains/benefits that mortgage long term growth.
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Furthermore, I can foresee vendors making incompatible changes to the code produced by CLang, subtle ABI breakage and the like. The upper levels will suffer too : vendor A's version
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Furthermore, I can foresee vendors making incompatible changes to the code produced by CLang, subtle ABI breakage and the like. The upper levels will suffer too : vendor A's version will not be able to compile source code with vendor B's extensions and vice versa.
Hindsight is invariably more accurate than foresight. And in this case, hindsight tells us that there are plenty of non-GPL free packages that you use every day that haven't succumbed to either of your fears. In fact you use at least a couple of them when you read this.
This sounds like the 1980s/ealy 1990s all over again
That wouldn't be bad. The productivity per user has never been higher, and most of what we use now was invented then. I'd rather see that again that these modern days where ideas are scarce and productivity per user base at an all time low.
And in this case, hindsight tells us that there are plenty of non-GPL free packages that you use every day that haven't succumbed to either of your fears
Yes but compilers are one area where this sort of thing has happened before and appears to be happening now. Where this fragmentation hasn't happened with BSD projects is when only one entity is heavily invested and cooperation isn't happening or his happening within the one entity.
I'd rather see that again that these modern days where ideas are scarc
When are these modern days with scarce ideas? I'd say we are having a pretty wonderful world of software diversity and experimentation. Just look at the incredible number of web frameworks, for designing interactive websites.
I think you just proved my point. These days, we have umpteen web frameworks. Back then, we had people inventing things like the web. We've reached a point where rehashing is considered innovation.
Compilers in their hayday never had diversity like this.
But how groundbreaking is that diversity? People quibble about which back-end to use for the compiler. Thus this thread.
With half the OSS code out there not even compiling without a gcc front-end, I don't think you have much of a case for diversity. I remember being able to use MipsPRO, Aztec, gcc, Manx or Sun
Back then, we had people inventing things like the web
Which took decades, GML started around in 1960. ISIL was in the 1980s. That's not a fair comparison you have no idea what technologies being invented today are important for the computing world of 2030. How would you know?
I can tell you as someone who was around when the web starting being used in the early 1990s I didn't think of it as all that big a deal. I actually thought Gopher with built in indexing was going to be better than the HTML with
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain.
It's already happened. This is why so many companies are now actively involved in the LLVM community: it's cheaper. I'm currently on my way back from BSDCan (where I was talking a bit about the progress in switching to clang) and I was at EuroLLVM a couple of weeks earlier. Both conferences were full of corporate contributors to LLVM and FreeBSD (two projects that I work on). They like the fact that the license means that they don't need to run everything that they possibly want to do past their legal team and, over the past decade, they've all discovered (at different speeds) that it's much cheaper to engage the community and push work upstream than it is to maintain a private fork.
You get much better support from companies that join your community because they regard it as being good for them than if they dump code on you because they are legally obliged to. We don't want drive-by code dumps, we want long-term commitments to maintenance.
Many companies for instance strip all comments from GPL'd source before releasing for legal reason
That's specifically illegal under the GPL. Source code is defined as what is used internally. If a company uses a commented version internally they can be forced to hand that over by the people whose code they are comingling with.
Making things up doesn't constitute a valid argument.
You don't have to disclose anything under the GPL unless you "convey" the work to others. There is nothing to force someone to hand over internally used code.
"To 'convey' a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies... You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force." -GPLv
You even quoted the correct line, "The 'source code' for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" The version used by developers for making modifications is the one with the comments.
As for the GPL what prevents someone from stripping comments is that the recipient can request source.
I prefer the form of the work which has a binding contract paying me $1M for viewing the source. I demand you provide source code.
Are you really that obtuse? The GPL is clearly making a distinction between high level "source code" and other forms of the code, so someone can't offer up, say, an intermediate assembly language output.
As I correctly pointed out, if the "conveyed" binary was compiled from a source with no comments in it, then source with no comments is all one has to provide.
The GPL is clearly making a distinction between high level "source code" and other forms of the code, so someone can't offer up, say, an intermediate assembly language output.... As I correctly pointed out, if the "conveyed" binary was compiled from a source with no comments in it, then source with no comments is all one has to provide
No that's not true, that is not what the GPL is doing. Source code is not defined as what you compile from but what you modify from. Source code the way you are using it,
Yes you cannot remove any lines from the version you worked on, the preferred form for modification that was used to create the binary you are distributing. I don't know what you mean by "original" there 3 different originals in the source code variant I was responding to.
I agree with you and good point regarding the X analogy. GCC has benefited time and time again from corporations contributing code that benefit other corporations in uses they never considered. LLVM has some substantial technical advantages over GCC. So we might end up with a situation like we had for a long time where GCC is standard based, feature rich but technically inferior to the commercial compilers many of which are LLVM based.
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain.
Or they'll be a mainline version that is maintained by an active community of both independent and paid corporate developers contributing code, and corporations that want to maintain proprietary extensions will do so in a modular way, contributing any necessary core support back to the mainline project.
There's plenty of widely-used non-GPLv3 (public doma
I think one of the heads of Red Hat nailed it when he was asked about RMS: "Richard treats his friends as his enemies". Whether the community wants to accept it or not when RMS specifically targeted a single company with GPL V3 he gave a pretty damned good reason for businesses to stay away from the GPL, fear of being the target of GPL V4.
That's a lot of meat without bones. Fear of being the target of parasite lawyers who sue over GPL is more of the reality, whether it's GPL2, 3, LGPL or other.
BTW I personally bet that if there is a GPL V4 the new buzzword will be "Androidization" since RMS hates Android even though it has put more Linux devices into users hands than anyone else in history.
I'm glad you have insight into Richard's brain and can tell us what he hates. As for bringing more devices into the hand of people, that's not the purpose of the open source movement. At best it's a side effect. The purpose is to do what governments and their constitutions fail to do - support progress, by ensuring that new code becomes available to
I'm glad you have insight into Richard's brain and can tell us what he hates.
Actually, that's the exact problem, isn't it? Nobody knows what RMS might do next week.
The purpose is to do what governments and their constitutions fail to do - support progress, by ensuring that new code becomes available to anyone who can improve on or learn from it.
That's clearly not the goal of the GPL3, because if it were, there would be no need of an anti-TiVoization clause, but the Affero clause would be standard.
A quick Google search for "gpl lawsuit" returned: About 1,810,000 results (0.21 seconds)
The publicity is enough to make managers worry, and their reaction isn't to investigate to get the real deal and make sure they dot their i's and cross their t's to avoid a potential GPL lawsuit, but to avoid GPL whenever they can.
I haven't seen that at all. People who are getting sued are generally getting sued for violating the GPL and on purpose. That's not lawyer parasites but the kinds of lawsuits that happen with commercial software all the time.
This is precisely what I predict as well, and in fact have in previous threads touching on this subject - if there is a GPLv4, it will target 'Androidization'. But on the main story, it's interesting how GPLv3 has become so toxic that the crown jewel of the GNU - namely GCC - is now being abandoned in droves by the BSDs. And mark my words - if Debian can do a FreeBSD edition called kFreeBSD which gets decorated w/ Debian userland, then similarly, they can also first make a Clang/LLVM, and then make a Linu
Them, and then, there are also the OpenBSD and NetBSD communities. OpenBSD is trying out PCC, and it's probably a matter of time before they too abandon GCC
I know there are reports that C is even with Java again. But what you say made me wonder about this. Despite what Java advocates say, the idea of the app server and enterprise Java was not new to Java. There were and still are brokers around that do much of what a Java app server does, but using C/C++. Tuxedo is one. The thing I am thinking about however, is that Java started a heyday when groups like Apache came around and there was a huge resource of Java utilities and helpers and libraries that were fre
I'm theorizing that Java took off because despite being further behind in enterprise architecture than C at the time (remember Tuxedo et al), it had a support community that didn't encumber the companies, so they backed this stream.
Java took off because C/C++ are a bear to work with, the time was right, and Sun was good at marketing, not because of some Apache libraries that were developed behind the popularity of Java.
C which also has a ton of libraries, but was hamstrung by GNU
At the point where Java took off GCC was not a very good compiler and was not a major player. The Linux kernel guys had had to fork it to try and get anything less than terrible performance. Intel's, Watcom, Microsoft, and a 4th I'm forgetting were the big players. In the early 2000s the technical disadvantages of GCC were still rather well known. We are in a rather unusual window for GCC where it seen as not just an open compiler but one
This modifies what I said a little, but not much. The change would be: C had either a very restrictive open source license or very restrictive closed source licenses. Java had an open license that at the same time didn't require companies to give away code they spent a ton of money to develop. Then Apache came along and made it even sweater by expanding the code base with even more open license will still not forcing companies to give away their code. And remember that a lot of the early app servers used at
I understand how you are reasoning through your essay. But no, that is not what happened at all. This is like one of those fiction pieces where you have people from a different time period responding to the events, like Liberty Kids which has kids with a totally modern mindset during the revolutionary war.
People back in the early to mid 1990s didn't think about compiler licenses much. For several decades compilers all had licenses which, unless you were writing a compiler or an OS, let you do what you wa
No need to be sorry. I don't have problems with people disagreeing when they are being rational and informative, or just being offhand.
I do remember paying for a Java IDE when first learning it at least a dozen years ago. It was the only way to get a decent IDE. But I also remember that for a time even into 2000 it was kind of de rigueur for Java programmers to use a programmers notepad rather than an IDE. And I agree that Java was almost certainly a device Sun was using to try to sell servers. But I think
I think by 2000 Java has already overtaken C as the most popular programming language. You are looking far too late. Apache BTW is around '94/95 not '99.
If you are looking at the Windows community, IIS is dominant not Apache. Active-X is allowing for web distributed clients, and enterprise stuff is mainly using SQL Server / Visual Basic.
If you are looking for the cause on the Windows side, around 2000, it was the release of Visual Basic.NET. By dropping compatibility it obsoleted a huge number of devel
Yeah, but my understanding is that most of the libraries used by/with GCC are GPL. Is that not so? The data is one thing, but once you have compiled your code into an object you still have to link it to the libraries if you want it to be useful. That is unless you want to write from scratch your own drivers, and your own stdio, and mem libraries, etc. All those include files are GPL'd libraries. Therefore I believe you would be using GPL code, so you would have to give away your code if you distribute the p
Oh, Hurd is pretty much abandonware as far as the FSF is concerned. The only people working on producing a working version of it are Arch and Debian, Otherwise, RMS himself says that Linux is the kernel of the GNU.
I'm out of mod points, sorry. I agree on all points. I'm frankly astonished at this view that the GPL or Stallman are evil or hateful or built with malicious intent.
Most big companies prefer a BSD or MIT license to GPL because it lets them take what they want and allows them to give back as much or as little as they want, including nothing. If your primary interest is promoting your own business, this makes sense. The GPL was not designed with facilitating profit as a goal, and as a result it doesn
company X writes code for Y that Y sells it as part of a suite to Z. If Y wants to GPL his stuff then X's community can use it. If Y wants to keep his stuff then he had to buy a commercial license from X. This way X got money from people with money, got contributions from people who were willing to contribute and could sue people who did neither.
But company X writes code for Y that Y sells as part of a SaaS suite to Z. doesn't constitute dist
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
This is absolutely the case! When TiVo was complying w/ GPLv2, the FSF suddenly discovered a major objection to their practice - namely, that they were putting the code in read-only devices, and declared a jihad on the company. However, even GPLv3 doesn't explicitly say that GPL software cannot be put on a Read-only memory (which would again violate the GNU's Freedom #3) or copy-protect memory (which could prevent the device that contains the software from getting copied) or anything else about the devices that the software can reside on.
As you very well put it, it's one more of those cases of the perfect being the enemy of the good, and in the process, the FSF waging a war on its own licensees, namely TiVo. Given that track record, which company in its right mind, even if they endorsed the liberation of software, would want to get into bed w/ the FSF?
Why guess about this, when it is so easy to google "Tivo GPL" or "Tivoization". From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Tivoization (pronounced "Teevo-ization") is a term coined to describe the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.
If the problem was simply that they were in violation of GPL v2 by not releaing the code, then there would not have been a reason to create a whole new license to address this.
They didn't declare a jihad. They indicated that TIVO had exposed a problem with the license and sought to fix it. Particularly since at the time what TIVO was doing was likely to become more mainstream with things like the Palladium initiative.
Given that track record, which company in its right mind, even if they endorsed the liberation of software, would want to get into bed w/ the FSF?
Companies that want to help a competitor get sued. Or companies that provide so
Labelling the problem as 'Tivoization' was pretty much an act of bad faith, even if they didn't actually have Tivo in mind as a violator but rather, a shortcoming of GPLv2. It's a reflection of their anti-corporate profile.
GPLv3 is great if a software project wants to release it in such a way that its competitors can use it, but not improvise on it and then release the improvized software. From that angle, it's good, and even GPLv2 satisfied that. However, granting all users patents that may otherwise
However, granting all users patents that may otherwise accidentally get violated is nothing but an act of bad faith,
What it is an act of is an attempt to use copyright law to address a problem in black letter patent law. A patent creates a way to violate the spirit of GPLv2 without violating the letter. The purpose of the GPLv3 is to close these kinds of loopholes.
and the termination clauses, which would allow any author to revoke their license in the event of a violation, is what makes it a double ed
Apple has mostly dumped GCC in Lion and replaced with Clang. They still include a GCC but it's very incompatible as it has LLVM back end and breaks stuff with inline assembler. I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
Probably just a stop-gap until everybody fixes their makefiles to use Clang rather than GCC. GCC is still the default command-line compiler. There's still a heap of open-source stuff in OS X (Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Postgresql,...) and also projects like MacPorts that enable you to compile most of the usual open-source suspects. Since these are mostly cross-platform, I'd assume that inline assembler is fairly rare, but build scripts that depend on GCC are fairly common.
Just for reference – they don't include gcc any more: Greyjoy:~ tatd2$ which gcc/usr/bin/gcc Greyjoy:~ tatd2$ ls -la/usr/bin/gcc lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12 22 Mar 15:43/usr/bin/gcc -> llvm-gcc-4.2
No, llvm-gcc is GCC. More precisely, it's the GCC front end with the LLVM back end. That's the one the GP was talking about; although it is GCC, it has some hairy edges where it doesn't behave quite like the standalone GCC.
The actual Clang compilers are called clang and clang++.
One reason for that is because the GCC team won't accept Apple's patches for new versions of Objective-C. Apple want to move Objective-C forward, GCC has become a barrier to that, so they support CLANG/LLVM development. The version of GCC included is simply for legacy support and will be removed in due course once CLANG support for C++ is good enough.
Clang/LLVM also gives you nifty stuff for interfacing with the IDE, far better compilation errors/warnings, faster compile times, etc.
But the "legacy" version of GCC isn't compatible with the older GCC. Include both and let the user decide. I need gcc for various reasons, I'm not using xcode and never will, I'm not writing mac or phone apps, so all Apple is doing is making Linux more attractive.
Yup, and am having troubles getting it to build as well. Even the mac ports version (universal so I can get 32/64 bit) has some problems with one application.
Maybe your time is better spent on #DEFINEs or similar to get your code to work on other compilers? Tying yourself to GCC irrespective of what apple does is not really a wise move.
Maybe. But we do have a lot of inline asm (ie, emulating RTOS task switching, third party code with optimized functions, etc). Ie, there is code that properly checks for __GNUC__ around some inline assembler but this fails because LLVM-GCC claims to be GCC but doesn't handle the syntax correctly (possibly an xcode 4.3 bug?). Probably with time we could get things working but I.T. is insistent that people upgrade now and be disrupted rather than put it off until code is ported and makefiles rewritten.
As far as I understand it this is the approach that LLVM recommends. Using the LLVM GCC front end for your code while you slowly migrate. If you want real GCC you can use the MacPorts version.
One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the
mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God.
-- J. Gustav White
What's wrong with GCC? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The GPL.
Dropping the GPL ~= worse. (Score:1, Flamebait)
While the BSD licensing model allows various hijinks to go around without the requirement of disclosure.
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization). Then again, you probably would rather throw some ad hominem at me regarding a certain GPL advocate.
Re:Dropping the GPL ~= worse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization).
I haven't heard Apple complaining about the GPL or trying to circumvent it - they're just switching to alternative projects.
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
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whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits.
This is symptomatic of PHB/MBA thinking: short term gains/benefits that mortgage long term growth.
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Furthermore, I can foresee vendors making incompatible changes to the code produced by CLang, subtle ABI breakage and the like. The upper levels will suffer too : vendor A's version
Re:Dropping the GPL ~= worse. (Score:5, Interesting)
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain. Furthermore, I can foresee vendors making incompatible changes to the code produced by CLang, subtle ABI breakage and the like. The upper levels will suffer too : vendor A's version will not be able to compile source code with vendor B's extensions and vice versa.
Hindsight is invariably more accurate than foresight. And in this case, hindsight tells us that there are plenty of non-GPL free packages that you use every day that haven't succumbed to either of your fears. In fact you use at least a couple of them when you read this.
This sounds like the 1980s/ealy 1990s all over again
That wouldn't be bad. The productivity per user has never been higher, and most of what we use now was invented then. I'd rather see that again that these modern days where ideas are scarce and productivity per user base at an all time low.
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> The productivity per user has never been higher
There were no software patents, so the point is very debatable.
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And in this case, hindsight tells us that there are plenty of non-GPL free packages that you use every day that haven't succumbed to either of your fears
Yes but compilers are one area where this sort of thing has happened before and appears to be happening now. Where this fragmentation hasn't happened with BSD projects is when only one entity is heavily invested and cooperation isn't happening or his happening within the one entity.
I'd rather see that again that these modern days where ideas are scarc
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When are these modern days with scarce ideas? I'd say we are having a pretty wonderful world of software diversity and experimentation. Just look at the incredible number of web frameworks, for designing interactive websites.
I think you just proved my point. These days, we have umpteen web frameworks. Back then, we had people inventing things like the web. We've reached a point where rehashing is considered innovation.
Compilers in their hayday never had diversity like this.
But how groundbreaking is that diversity?
People quibble about which back-end to use for the compiler. Thus this thread.
With half the OSS code out there not even compiling without a gcc front-end, I don't think you have much of a case for diversity. I remember being able to use MipsPRO, Aztec, gcc, Manx or Sun
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Back then, we had people inventing things like the web
Which took decades, GML started around in 1960. ISIL was in the 1980s. That's not a fair comparison you have no idea what technologies being invented today are important for the computing world of 2030. How would you know?
I can tell you as someone who was around when the web starting being used in the early 1990s I didn't think of it as all that big a deal. I actually thought Gopher with built in indexing was going to be better than the HTML with
Re:Dropping the GPL ~= worse. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a couple of years time, there will be a proliferation of different, incompatible versions of CLang/LLVM that will be increasingly expensive to maintain.
It's already happened. This is why so many companies are now actively involved in the LLVM community: it's cheaper. I'm currently on my way back from BSDCan (where I was talking a bit about the progress in switching to clang) and I was at EuroLLVM a couple of weeks earlier. Both conferences were full of corporate contributors to LLVM and FreeBSD (two projects that I work on). They like the fact that the license means that they don't need to run everything that they possibly want to do past their legal team and, over the past decade, they've all discovered (at different speeds) that it's much cheaper to engage the community and push work upstream than it is to maintain a private fork.
You get much better support from companies that join your community because they regard it as being good for them than if they dump code on you because they are legally obliged to. We don't want drive-by code dumps, we want long-term commitments to maintenance.
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Many companies for instance strip all comments from GPL'd source before releasing for legal reason
That's specifically illegal under the GPL. Source code is defined as what is used internally. If a company uses a commented version internally they can be forced to hand that over by the people whose code they are comingling with.
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Making things up doesn't constitute a valid argument.
You don't have to disclose anything under the GPL unless you "convey" the work to others. There is nothing to force someone to hand over internally used code.
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You even quoted the correct line, "The 'source code' for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" The version used by developers for making modifications is the one with the comments.
As for the GPL what prevents someone from stripping comments is that the recipient can request source.
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Are you really that obtuse? The GPL is clearly making a distinction between high level "source code" and other forms of the code, so someone can't offer up, say, an intermediate assembly language output.
As I correctly pointed out, if the "conveyed" binary was compiled from a source with no comments in it, then source with no comments is all one has to provide.
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The GPL is clearly making a distinction between high level "source code" and other forms of the code, so someone can't offer up, say, an intermediate assembly language output.... As I correctly pointed out, if the "conveyed" binary was compiled from a source with no comments in it, then source with no comments is all one has to provide
No that's not true, that is not what the GPL is doing. Source code is not defined as what you compile from but what you modify from. Source code the way you are using it,
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Is it also your position that since you can't remove comments, you can't remove lines of code from the original as part of your modification?
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Yes you cannot remove any lines from the version you worked on, the preferred form for modification that was used to create the binary you are distributing. I don't know what you mean by "original" there 3 different originals in the source code variant I was responding to.
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I agree with you and good point regarding the X analogy. GCC has benefited time and time again from corporations contributing code that benefit other corporations in uses they never considered. LLVM has some substantial technical advantages over GCC. So we might end up with a situation like we had for a long time where GCC is standard based, feature rich but technically inferior to the commercial compilers many of which are LLVM based.
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Or they'll be a mainline version that is maintained by an active community of both independent and paid corporate developers contributing code, and corporations that want to maintain proprietary extensions will do so in a modular way, contributing any necessary core support back to the mainline project.
There's plenty of widely-used non-GPLv3 (public doma
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I think one of the heads of Red Hat nailed it when he was asked about RMS: "Richard treats his friends as his enemies". Whether the community wants to accept it or not when RMS specifically targeted a single company with GPL V3 he gave a pretty damned good reason for businesses to stay away from the GPL, fear of being the target of GPL V4.
That's a lot of meat without bones. Fear of being the target of parasite lawyers who sue over GPL is more of the reality, whether it's GPL2, 3, LGPL or other.
BTW I personally bet that if there is a GPL V4 the new buzzword will be "Androidization" since RMS hates Android even though it has put more Linux devices into users hands than anyone else in history.
I'm glad you have insight into Richard's brain and can tell us what he hates.
As for bringing more devices into the hand of people, that's not the purpose of the open source movement. At best it's a side effect. The purpose is to do what governments and their constitutions fail to do - support progress, by ensuring that new code becomes available to
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I'm glad you have insight into Richard's brain and can tell us what he hates.
Actually, that's the exact problem, isn't it? Nobody knows what RMS might do next week.
The purpose is to do what governments and their constitutions fail to do - support progress, by ensuring that new code becomes available to anyone who can improve on or learn from it.
That's clearly not the goal of the GPL3, because if it were, there would be no need of an anti-TiVoization clause, but the Affero clause would be standard.
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As for bringing more devices into the hand of people, that's not the purpose of the Free Software movement. At best it's a side effect. .
FTFY. Making more software open source is precisely the goal of the open source movement. But not that of the FSF.
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What lawyers have sued over GPL beyond a few special cases?
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A quick Google search for "gpl lawsuit" returned:
About 1,810,000 results (0.21 seconds)
The publicity is enough to make managers worry, and their reaction isn't to investigate to get the real deal and make sure they dot their i's and cross their t's to avoid a potential GPL lawsuit, but to avoid GPL whenever they can.
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I haven't seen that at all. People who are getting sued are generally getting sued for violating the GPL and on purpose. That's not lawyer parasites but the kinds of lawsuits that happen with commercial software all the time.
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How large is the Freebsd community ? Four cats or five dogs ?
Yeah that's some "droves" of developers there abandoning the gpl license.
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Use of Java/Apache vs C/C++/Gnu (Score:3)
I know there are reports that C is even with Java again. But what you say made me wonder about this. Despite what Java advocates say, the idea of the app server and enterprise Java was not new to Java. There were and still are brokers around that do much of what a Java app server does, but using C/C++. Tuxedo is one. The thing I am thinking about however, is that Java started a heyday when groups like Apache came around and there was a huge resource of Java utilities and helpers and libraries that were fre
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I'm theorizing that Java took off because despite being further behind in enterprise architecture than C at the time (remember Tuxedo et al), it had a support community that didn't encumber the companies, so they backed this stream.
Java took off because C/C++ are a bear to work with, the time was right, and Sun was good at marketing, not because of some Apache libraries that were developed behind the popularity of Java.
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C which also has a ton of libraries, but was hamstrung by GNU
At the point where Java took off GCC was not a very good compiler and was not a major player. The Linux kernel guys had had to fork it to try and get anything less than terrible performance. Intel's, Watcom, Microsoft, and a 4th I'm forgetting were the big players. In the early 2000s the technical disadvantages of GCC were still rather well known. We are in a rather unusual window for GCC where it seen as not just an open compiler but one
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This modifies what I said a little, but not much. The change would be: C had either a very restrictive open source license or very restrictive closed source licenses. Java had an open license that at the same time didn't require companies to give away code they spent a ton of money to develop. Then Apache came along and made it even sweater by expanding the code base with even more open license will still not forcing companies to give away their code. And remember that a lot of the early app servers used at
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I understand how you are reasoning through your essay. But no, that is not what happened at all. This is like one of those fiction pieces where you have people from a different time period responding to the events, like Liberty Kids which has kids with a totally modern mindset during the revolutionary war.
People back in the early to mid 1990s didn't think about compiler licenses much. For several decades compilers all had licenses which, unless you were writing a compiler or an OS, let you do what you wa
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No need to be sorry. I don't have problems with people disagreeing when they are being rational and informative, or just being offhand.
I do remember paying for a Java IDE when first learning it at least a dozen years ago. It was the only way to get a decent IDE. But I also remember that for a time even into 2000 it was kind of de rigueur for Java programmers to use a programmers notepad rather than an IDE. And I agree that Java was almost certainly a device Sun was using to try to sell servers. But I think
Whoops! (Score:2)
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I think by 2000 Java has already overtaken C as the most popular programming language. You are looking far too late. Apache BTW is around '94/95 not '99.
If you are looking at the Windows community, IIS is dominant not Apache. Active-X is allowing for web distributed clients, and enterprise stuff is mainly using SQL Server / Visual Basic.
If you are looking for the cause on the Windows side, around 2000, it was the release of Visual Basic .NET. By dropping compatibility it obsoleted a huge number of devel
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Most big companies prefer a BSD or MIT license to GPL because it lets them take what they want and allows them to give back as much or as little as they want, including nothing. If your primary interest is promoting your own business, this makes sense. The GPL was not designed with facilitating profit as a goal, and as a result it doesn
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It is not really an RMS issue.
The model that worked well for GPLv2 was:
company X writes code for Y that Y sells it as part of a suite to Z.
If Y wants to GPL his stuff then X's community can use it.
If Y wants to keep his stuff then he had to buy a commercial license from X.
This way X got money from people with money, got contributions from people who were willing to contribute and could sue people who did neither.
But
company X writes code for Y that Y sells as part of a SaaS suite to Z.
doesn't constitute dist
'Tivoization' a problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
This is absolutely the case! When TiVo was complying w/ GPLv2, the FSF suddenly discovered a major objection to their practice - namely, that they were putting the code in read-only devices, and declared a jihad on the company. However, even GPLv3 doesn't explicitly say that GPL software cannot be put on a Read-only memory (which would again violate the GNU's Freedom #3) or copy-protect memory (which could prevent the device that contains the software from getting copied) or anything else about the devices that the software can reside on.
As you very well put it, it's one more of those cases of the perfect being the enemy of the good, and in the process, the FSF waging a war on its own licensees, namely TiVo. Given that track record, which company in its right mind, even if they endorsed the liberation of software, would want to get into bed w/ the FSF?
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> namely, that they were putting the code in read-only devices
without making the source available under the terms of the gpl, I guess?
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Why guess about this, when it is so easy to google "Tivo GPL" or "Tivoization". From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Tivoization (pronounced "Teevo-ization") is a term coined to describe the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.
If the problem was simply that they were in violation of GPL v2 by not releaing the code, then there would not have been a reason to create a whole new license to address this.
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and declared a jihad on the company
They didn't declare a jihad. They indicated that TIVO had exposed a problem with the license and sought to fix it. Particularly since at the time what TIVO was doing was likely to become more mainstream with things like the Palladium initiative.
Given that track record, which company in its right mind, even if they endorsed the liberation of software, would want to get into bed w/ the FSF?
Companies that want to help a competitor get sued. Or companies that provide so
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Labelling the problem as 'Tivoization' was pretty much an act of bad faith, even if they didn't actually have Tivo in mind as a violator but rather, a shortcoming of GPLv2. It's a reflection of their anti-corporate profile.
GPLv3 is great if a software project wants to release it in such a way that its competitors can use it, but not improvise on it and then release the improvized software. From that angle, it's good, and even GPLv2 satisfied that. However, granting all users patents that may otherwise
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However, granting all users patents that may otherwise accidentally get violated is nothing but an act of bad faith,
What it is an act of is an attempt to use copyright law to address a problem in black letter patent law. A patent creates a way to violate the spirit of GPLv2 without violating the letter. The purpose of the GPLv3 is to close these kinds of loopholes.
and the termination clauses, which would allow any author to revoke their license in the event of a violation, is what makes it a double ed
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Apple has mostly dumped GCC in Lion and replaced with Clang. They still include a GCC but it's very incompatible as it has LLVM back end and breaks stuff with inline assembler. I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
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I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
Probably just a stop-gap until everybody fixes their makefiles to use Clang rather than GCC. GCC is still the default command-line compiler. There's still a heap of open-source stuff in OS X (Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Postgresql,...) and also projects like MacPorts that enable you to compile most of the usual open-source suspects. Since these are mostly cross-platform, I'd assume that inline assembler is fairly rare, but build scripts that depend on GCC are fairly common.
I'd guess the LLVM backend is for
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Just for reference – they don't include gcc any more: /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc -> llvm-gcc-4.2
Greyjoy:~ tatd2$ which gcc
Greyjoy:~ tatd2$ ls -la
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12 22 Mar 15:43
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No, llvm-gcc is GCC. More precisely, it's the GCC front end with the LLVM back end. That's the one the GP was talking about; although it is GCC, it has some hairy edges where it doesn't behave quite like the standalone GCC.
The actual Clang compilers are called clang and clang++.
clang, clang++,... (Score:2)
Re:Dropping the GPL ~= worse. (Score:4, Informative)
One reason for that is because the GCC team won't accept Apple's patches for new versions of Objective-C. Apple want to move Objective-C forward, GCC has become a barrier to that, so they support CLANG/LLVM development. The version of GCC included is simply for legacy support and will be removed in due course once CLANG support for C++ is good enough.
Clang/LLVM also gives you nifty stuff for interfacing with the IDE, far better compilation errors/warnings, faster compile times, etc.
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But the "legacy" version of GCC isn't compatible with the older GCC. Include both and let the user decide. I need gcc for various reasons, I'm not using xcode and never will, I'm not writing mac or phone apps, so all Apple is doing is making Linux more attractive.
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Yup, and am having troubles getting it to build as well. Even the mac ports version (universal so I can get 32/64 bit) has some problems with one application.
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Maybe. But we do have a lot of inline asm (ie, emulating RTOS task switching, third party code with optimized functions, etc). Ie, there is code that properly checks for __GNUC__ around some inline assembler but this fails because LLVM-GCC claims to be GCC but doesn't handle the syntax correctly (possibly an xcode 4.3 bug?). Probably with time we could get things working but I.T. is insistent that people upgrade now and be disrupted rather than put it off until code is ported and makefiles rewritten.
Is
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Due to licensing changes, apple are unable/unwilling to bundle newer versions. So maybe it is too much?
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As far as I understand it this is the approach that LLVM recommends. Using the LLVM GCC front end for your code while you slowly migrate. If you want real GCC you can use the MacPorts version.