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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

I do not believe you can claim that Stallman does not understand the real world impacts of license decisions in complex software ecosystems: the LGPL is an example, which is designed to be used when entering a realm with existing high-quality commercial competition, and in the case of Ogg Vorbis Stallman actually recommended the use of a BSD license as it made more sense as the real battle was against MP3, not between implementations of Vorbis.

http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

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I'm not saying, though, that he's unaware of the real world impacts. I'm saying that he doesn't care about them (in this case). He is a smart man, and a visionary, and believe it or not, I have a great deal of respect for him, in large part because of how prophetic he's been regarding some of the troubling developments of recent years. That said, he doesn't appear to care about the impact of this decision, which is to drive everyone to clang/llvm.

If no one forks gcc to keep it from becoming technically inferior, then in ten years, we'll just have another open source compiler monoculture, but this time it will be clang/llvm.

(Edit: forgot an important word.)

I rather have the impression that the development of IDEs ran past Mr Stallman - he didn't witness the development in refactoring, code completion etc. since these features are essentially implement in commercial IDEs (which he despises). So he just doesn't know anything about how useful (or not) these features are. He learned and did programming "in the old way" and sticked to that.

It doesn't have to be like that. I suggested elsewhere in that thread that emacs maintainers should use llvm for what they need, since it can already provide that service. This would require further down the road to have Gcc match llvm feature-wise (except maybe that feature), so that compilation of code accepted by llvm would be possible with Gcc.

I'm almost certain that RMS would veto the use of LLVM. He clearly views LLVM as an enemy of 'freedom'.

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