Re: Licence of ts-comint

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Not necessarily. nVidia has enough money they could write their own backends
  > from scratch,

The GPL does not allow linking GCC front ends with nonfree backends.
They would have had to write an entire compiler.

                  which would mean users losing out on all the research that's
  > gone into LLVM, any chance of compatibility with standard tools, etc.

These are side issues when our freedom is at stake.

  > No company with sufficient resources is forced to participate in free
  > software,

nVidia could, in principle, have written a compiler from scratch.  In
practice, that is a big job and success is not guaranteed.  nVidia's
compiler might not have worked as well.  It might not have worked well
at all.  It might have been too expensive to finish.  nVidia might
have given up, at the outset or after a couple of years of work.

The GPL has induced many basically uncooperative companies and
organizations to contribute their code to the free world
so that they could use GPL-covered code.

They are pretty strongly pressured, and that's usualy good enough.

If only the developers of LLVM had not given nVidia a way to bypass
our pressure, I think we would have a free compiler for a known
instruction set.

  > Without free software, we would simply
  > descend into further fragmentation, lack of interoperability, and no chance 
at
  > all to benefit from the work of others.

When that work is nonfree software, the invitation to use it is hardly a
benefit.  It's a trap.

Of course, there are various sorts of secondary benefits and secondary
problems.  Everything that happens causes secondary benefits and
secondary problems.  Those are side issues.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.