Re: elementary OS

[David Chisnall]

On 10 Feb 2014, at 21:30, Gerold Rupprecht <geroldr@bluewin.ch> wrote:

> The newer syntax in Objective-C require some hacking on GCC, the
> compiler collection. David Chisnell is very capable, but has been
> working mostly on Clang. Getting similar features into GCC would be a
> big plus. David, I would love to hear your thoughts if this would be a
> fruitful endeavor to broaden the appeal of Etoilé?

GCC support for Objective-C is dead, and GCC support for ARM is likely to 
languish.  I talk quite regularly to ARM's compiler group.  They have customers 
in two categories:

- Won't use GCC because of the license (GPLv3 means to a lot of companies 
'don't let this code in the door')

- Will use whatever compiler ARM recommends

As such, ARM is focussing entirely on LLVM and encouraging their partners to do 
the same.  The two big mobile operating systems, iOS and Android, are backed by 
the two companies that employ the majority of LLVM developers.

The license is, to be honest, also an impediment for GNUstep.  I'm seeing 
increasingly that commercial entities have two strategies with open source:

- If it's copyleft, fork it and don't tell anyone.  Obfuscate your binaries a 
little bit and hope no one sues.  This generally works, because most open 
source projects either don't have the resources to sue, don't care, or don't 
want to frighten off other companies by being seen as litigious.  

- If it's permissively licensed, fork it and upstream anything that doesn't 
give you a competitive advantage, so that your merge costs are lower (and so 
other people fix your bugs).

There are two or three companies that I strongly suspect of following the first 
approach with GNUstep and I think we missed an opportunity with them, as each 
is independently putting more manpower into their private fork than we are on 
upstream.  

Having the tools under GPLv3 is also a problem, because shipping working 
programs requires shipping many of the tools (at least defaults and gpbs) and 
that puts companies off.  It's no accident that most of the biggest users of 
GNUstep use it for in-house development and not distributing the result.  

I find it increasingly difficult to be motivated to work on a project where I 
most likely can't use the results commercially because it has a license that is 
not permitted by most of the companies that I work with.  I am not the only one 
who has this problem: Nicolas (who used to be a very active contributor) is now 
writing an entirely new GUI toolkit on his employer's time because they don't 
want copyleft software touching their products.  

David

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