This headline grossly misstates the content of the post. Apple wanted a closed source front end that could be linked with the open source gcc internal/backend. At no point would the existing GCC code ever become proprietary under this flawed scheme.

This wasn't Apple at this time. This was after Jobs had been ousted and had gone with NeXT.

Also note that RMS wrote this in 1993

Although I do not care for everything Stallman says and does, I do appreciate his consistency.

And eventually Apple starts supporting LLVM and the rest is history. Less and less of GCC is being used by Apple these days.

And of course, LLVM is free and open source as well... just without the GPL.

And with proprietary frontends(like flash)

And I think that's fine with RMS — Apple didn't get GNU's work for free for their proprietary IDE and had to develop their own software.

I'm just not wasting time reading anything RMS has written ... Thanks for the memories but:

- You've jumped the shark.

- You're no longer relevant.

- You've alienated so many of your fans.

- You've pushed zealotry to a new level.

- You've turned a conversation into a continuous rant.

And the sad part is that I suspect you'll never look back on what you did accomplish and feel satisfaction. You'll just continue raging against the goals you couldn't reach.

Registration required. Could somebody paste or summarize the link? Thanks.

It's the second message in this document: http://www.anonymous-insider.net/free-software/research/1993...

The first message also gives a little more context.

Why didn't Apple just have their front-end emit GNU C with #line directives?

It would have probably been far more annoying to compile to something like that. I've not programmed in Objective C but I believe that it was designed to avoid some of the issues that arose out of C++ being originally a preprocessor like that on top of C. Given that they wanted to do that, having to compile to some kind of IR, then to C, they would have likely had a much harder time getting the code optimized in any reasonable manner. I would also imagine that this would make debugging any part of the compiler that ended up producing incorrect code far more difficult to do.

Again, this was NeXT; not Apple.

I believe that the early Objective-C compiler did emit C.

Based on the domain next to the headline, I thought Stallman was posting to Google Plus for a minute. Heh.

(I was surprised to see Douglas Crockford posting there.)

Keep in mind, Stallman is the douche who wrote this:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

I think he's lost the right to offer opinions about Steve or Apple.

Stallman wrote this in 1993.