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Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

> what has had FSF backing and been successful?

GCC is still indispensable. I doubt it will be rewritten in Rust any time soon.

Off the top of my head: GCC, Emacs, coreutils, sed, grep, find, parallel, Guile, Coreboot, GNOME, GIMP, GnuPG, Bash

In each case, development is the work of the developers, and they themselves deserve most credit. But the FSF and the GNU project have certainly been involved with lots of software that is important, widely used, and works well.

GNU software is still responsible for huge and often critical chunks of the stack in most Linux distros.

GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.

Not necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.

"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.

The vulnerability in the thinking is that if GNU can't reliably get crystals started, if the seeds that make it are dependent on some external force like Cygnus or Linux, and dominant GCC can become has-been GCC, maybe we're looking at an afterglow of some luck and experiment that has a very bleak future if left alone.

Maybe people realized the FSF model isn't sustainable, and a model dependent on mass-volunteerism and religious viral spread of cooperative behaviors falls off when the days become months and the months become years. What if the greys are not being replaced by the dabbers. If that's the case, there won't be another bang.

Maybe see what I'm up to with https://prizeforge.com. I'm hoping to get the MVP functioning with semi-decency today. Mac does not agree with the WASM and I have at least one small dirty hack to execute before I can go live.

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