Eric S. Raymond Calls Out The FSF/GCC On Clang

[prodigy_]

I see this as a slow attempt to turn things proprietary and earn money by lock-in.

More like a lazy attempt at getting some free publicity. Mission accomplished, BTW. Thank you, Phoronix. /golfclap

[raineee]

ESR's comment is uninformed, and he has apologized for this.

[CrvenaZvezda]

I would rather listen to what RMS has to say about the subject.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

GCC has already lost on technical merits and mind share where it counts: investment.

[ciplogic]

Are politics news? Even if Eric S. Raymond writes it doesn't make always a problem of Clang or GCC. Given this still should be read in context.
Ian Taylor, an important GCC developer writes:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00181.html

I'm sympathetic to our comments regarding GCC vs. clang. But I'm not
sure I grasp your proposed solution. GCC does support plugins, and
has supported them for a few releases now.

GCC plugins have what turns out to be a significant defect: the plugin
interface simply exposes GCC internals, and as such is not stable
across releases. I pushed for plugins in GCC, and I thought this
unstable interface would be OK, but I was wrong. For general plugins
to be useful, we need a more stable interface.

But that is a technical issue, not a licensing issue. You are talking
about licensing issues. Do you think the licensing requirements on
plugins are too onerous?

Because of the non-standard interface, the most effective way for
people to write plugins for GCC today is to use something like MELT
(http://gcc-melt.org) or the GCC Python plugin
(https://fedorahosted.org/gcc-python-plugin/). These provide a
somewhat more standard interface across releases.

Ideally we would develop a standard interface for C as well. There
have been some efforts along those lines but as far as I know none of
them have been committed to the tree.

Ian

And even Eric responded as:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00182.html

Then I don't understand why David Kastrup's question was even controversial.

If I have failed to understand the background facts, I apologize and welcome
being corrected.

I hope you (and others) understand that I welcome chances to help the FSF's
projects when I believe doing so serves the hacker community as a whole. The
fact that I am currently working full-time on cleaning up the Emacs repoaitory
for full git conversion is only one instance of this.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

(emphasis mine)

[aphirst]

Michael, in light of the information that's been presented in this thread, I'm very disappointed in the sensationalist spin-like nature of the main article.

[Guest]

Eric S. Raymond should go to proprietary vendors and tell them to free their code under GPL. I don't understand why he attacks FSF which is the best example of giving users freedom. Sounds like a troll to me.

[Guest]

GCC has already lost on technical merits and mind share where it counts: investment.

That's funny, because it's used probably in every Linux distribution. Clang can't even compile Linux kernel yet and GCC is faster and more feature rich. I'd like to hear about those "technical" merits you're talking about. Clang is nice, but it's still behind GCC.

[Vim_User]

Eric S. Raymond should go to proprietary vendors and tell them to free their code under GPL. I don't understand why he attacks FSF which is the best example of giving users freedom. Sounds like a troll to me.

So making an objection and trying to improve things is now attacking the FSF? May be you have the right to call him a troll when you have contributed as much to the FSF as he did.

[Guest]

So making an objection and trying to improve things is now attacking the FSF? May be you have the right to call him a troll when you have contributed as much to the FSF as he did.

I don't have to contribute at all to have such right. Icaza started gnome, but it's obvious he betrayed FLOSS and he trolled many times about Linux. In this case it could be the same. However, I didn't call Eric a troll, but I just said it sounds like that to me. He's aware of FSF goals and codex, so his objection could be considered as an attack.