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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Embedded compiler vendors and UNIXes want a possibly slightly patched C or C++ compiler, maybe with an extra back-end bolted on. I'm talking about use-cases like Rust and Zig and Swift, projects which want a solid optimizing back-end but their own front-end and tooling.

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And FOSS folks most likely would like to enjoy those patches as well on their installations.

And they do! You can choose not to contribute your changes back to permissively-licensed software, but in actual practice most people do contribute them. It's not like the Rust compiler is proprietary software with their own closed-source fork of LLVM...

> You can choose not to contribute your changes back to permissively-licensed software, but in actual practice most people do contribute them.

They contribute some things, sure. But the also don't contribute some things. It is hard to know how much because it's kept secret from all of us, even their own customers.

> "It's not like the Rust compiler is proprietary software with their own closed-source fork of LLVM..."

Rust no, hut there are a lot of proprietary, semi-incompatible proprietary forks out there.

I haven't advocated for re-licensing GCC to be permissively licensed. And patching GCC is necessarily going to be much easier for vendors than to build a new C front-end which generates GCC IR. So I'm not sure what difference you think what I'm proposing would make with regard to your concerns.

gccrs is a rust implementation for gcc. Just because Rust developers don't want their users to be fully free doesn't mean there are any problems with gcc. And clang is developed by Apple which is a huge warning sign by itself.

LLVM/Clang is evolving more quickly than and is a much richer base for innovation than GCC is. LLVM spawned Rust, Swift, and Zig. The most recent GCC languages are Spark and COBOL.

One of the reasons that LLVM has been able to evolve so quickly is because of all the corporate contribution it gets.

GCC users want Clang/LLVM users to know how dumb they are for taking advantage of all the voluntary corporate investment in Clang/LLVM because, if you just used GCC instead, corporate contributions would be involuntary.

The GPL teaches us that we are not really free unless we have taken choice away from the developers and contributors who provide the code we use. This is the “fifth freedom”.

The “four freedoms” that the Free Software Foundation talks about are all provided by MIT and BSD. Those only represent “partial freedom”.

Only the GPL makes you “fully free” by providing the “fifth freedom”—-freedom to claim ownership over code other people will write in the future.

Sure, the “other people” are less free. But that is the price that needs to be paid for our freedom. Proper freedom (“full freedom”) is always rooted in the subjugation of others.

GPL gives more freedom to software users. BSD gives more freedom to software developers.

I think that's the core difference.

Amazon and the like appreciate indeed their freedom not to contribute back, while pumping the cash register.

Some slaves were treated well, fed nicely and overall had rather good life. Yet, they remained slaves, so master could take all of that from them at any moment.

But hey, if you try hard to be nice to your master and do not demand anything, for sure they will always treat you well!

It's an early implementation of a part of rust. It's not even close to being able to use as the daily compiler.

And gccrs is not really very widely used and is not the "official" Rust compiler. The Rust project chose to base their compiler on LLVM, for good technical reasons. That's bad news for the GCC project.

I thought that most FOSS projects took multiple compiler implementations as a sign of a healthy language environment, without much prestige associated with being the "premier" compiler and instead having more of an it-takes-a-village attitude. Granted, I'm mostly extrapolating from Go and Python here - is it a sharper divide in the Rust community?

No, and I think the gccrs project is great and a sign that the language is maturing. I'm just saying that LLVM was chosen instead of GCC to build the official Rust compiler for very good technical reasons, and that ought to worry GCC.

Rust developers don't "not want their users to be fully free", they disagree with you on which license is best. Don't deliberately phrase people's motivations in an uncharitable way, it's obnoxious as hell.

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