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A comment on FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system. Parent comment

Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by justinmeiners on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @10:26AM (#22475159)
Why does good things coming from another license mean GPL isn't working? GPL guarantees a lot of rights that an important minority of developers finds valuable . If you don't care for it, Im not here to convince you, but I think you should be glad it at least exists.
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by umanwizard on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @10:35AM (#22475278)
You are right -- the GPL has been enormously important to the free software movement. I (perhaps wrongly) interpreted your post as being anti-permissive more than pro-copyleft. My apologies!
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by justinmeiners on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @03:02PM (#22478234)
makes sense, I like permissive licenses too.
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by lmm on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @11:53PM (#22481306)
The existence of LLVM means that GCC's GPL can't really guarantee anything anymore. 20 years ago we got an open-source objective-C compiler because its implementers wanted to reuse GCC's backend. But today a company in the same situation would just use the LLVM backend.
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by pjmlp on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @02:57AM (#22481940)
Except with LLVM they wouldn't need to return their work to GCC, like NeXT was forced to do with their frontend.
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by lmm on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:15AM (#22483453)
That's exactly my point. GCC's copyleft was only effective when there wasn't a viable permissive-licensed alternative.
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