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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 rgovostes on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @12:05PM (#22476357)
Do you have any source for that? I found a post[0] on Slashdot from March 2000 that Apple "plans to assign the copyright for its changes to gcc to the [FSF]." Neither the post nor the comments I skimmed seem to make reference to a victorious GPL lawsuit. (Unfortunately the original mailing list post is lost.)

The earliest snapshot[1] of opensource.apple.com on the Internet Archive suggests that the compiler sources were available (under "cc") as of October 12, 2000.

Although that snapshot suggests the first release was version cc-792, I can't find older than cc-798 on the site today. But the NOTES file[2] is interesting, detailing NeXT's/Apple's earlier changes including release codenames. (3/19/97: "This is the first fully functional compiler for the PowerPC.")

I would guess that the earliest Apple shipped gcc was with ProjectBuilder in the Mac OS X Developer Preview which was in 1999. Maybe things start to get blurry with NeXT, WebObjects, etc. but it doesn't _seem_ like Apple was shirking it's responsibilities under the GPL.

0: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/00/03/17/1656240/apple-plan...

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20001012121451/http://www.openso...

2: https://opensource.apple.com/source/cc/cc-798/NOTES.auto.htm...

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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by monocasa on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @12:21PM (#22476539)
Ok, so I misremembered, it didn't get to the point of a full lawsuit, only lawyers sending increasingly nasty notes at eachother, but it's still the first GPL enforcement action.

Its was NextStep. They tried for a long time to ship a proprietary GCC, then a proprietary frontend with the rest of gcc, then finally backed down and released the frontend. This was all in the early nineties.

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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by rgovostes on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @03:23PM (#22478378)
I see. I was just using Nvidia’s CUDA compiler and it seems to be similar—-a combination of a proprietary frontend based on EDG and gcc to produce actual binaries.
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Re:FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system by monocasa on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @10:45AM (#22484685)
It's different, NVCC emits C code, then invokes a version of GCC on that code for the local system.

NextStep was trying to link a new frontend at the same level as C, C++, or Fortran, and just give the middle finger to the terms of the GPL.

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