Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it become standard compiler?)

David O'Brien obrien at FreeBSD.org
Sat Jan 31 18:23:28 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 06:20:33PM +0100, Michel Talon wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 11:21:00AM -0500, Kevin Wilcox wrote:
> > 2009/1/14 Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr>:
> > > Apparently the FreeBSD project doesn't want to include any GPL V3
> > > because there are industrial partners who have banned the GPl V3,
> > > out of purely ideological position, without any rational basis. I
> > > wonder why the FreeBSD project has any reason to follow them.
> > 
> > If you make the claim that banning GPL v3 is being done by commercial
> > entities that rely on FreeBSD (and other BSD licensed code) for
> > reasons that are purely ideological and have no rational basis then
> > you either do not fully understand the significance of GPL v3 versus
> > GPL v2, you haven't sufficiently worked with a commercial entity with
> > regards to GPL/LGPL/BSD code that you (or others) have licensed to
> > them or you are just trying to troll the FreeBSD community. I would
> > wager the first two are the case here?
> 
> Yes, i make the claim that, as far as the compiler tool chain is considered,
> there is no difference between GPL V2 and GPL V3 because both licences
> make no restriction on the software compiled with the tool chain.

Incorrect.  The read of our lawyers at $WORK is that there are open
questions on the libstdc++ and other GCC libs in the GPLv3 versions.

[This was pre-'GCC RUNTIME LIBRARY EXCEPTION' (Version 3, 27 January
2009)]

So yes, there companies that are concerned about this for non-ideological
reasons.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)


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