None of the permissive licenses have this problem.
GPLv2 and Apache.
The "or later" has been used in creative ways, like relicencing all the Wikipedia content, or the Affero to AGPL transition. Nothing shady, but unexpected.
Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF.
Do you trust the current members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I don't know them.
Do you trust the future members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence???
Yes he is: https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board
If you're worried about the other direction (i.e. a hypothetical GPLv4 that had some bizarre restriction like "all users must donate to the FSF"), the "or any later version" means that as long as you don't decide to update the license you use yourself, people can continue to use it under the GPLv2 or v3 indefinitely.
Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.
He threw open-source developers under the bus in the process. As a result approximately nobody writes GCC plugins, open source or otherwise.
> It is not our goal to “help Windows users” by making text editing on Windows more convenient. We aim to replace proprietary software, not to enhance it. So why support GNU Emacs on Windows?
> We hope that the experience of using GNU Emacs on Windows will give programmers a taste of freedom, and that this will later inspire them to move to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. That is the main valid reason to support free applications on nonfree operating systems.
RMS has been exceedingly clear about his views for decades. At this point it's hard to be surprised that he’ll make a pro-Free Software decision every time, without fail. That doesn't mean you have to agree with his decisions, of course! But to be shocked or disappointed by them is a sign of not understanding his platform.
RMS: Here’s how they'll get ya!
Me: Nice, but that'd never happen.
Vendor: Here’s how we got ya!
Me: Dammit.
Seriously, he must have a working crystal ball.
Now, my agreement with him starts and ends on that subject. He says plenty of other things I wholly disagree with. But his warnings about proprietary software lock-in? Every. Single. Time.
Also, if you want Windows to die you need to work with OEMs: I assume that most users simply use whatever OS is pre-installed.
With OS X on one side, and POSIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000 side, everyone would be doing their UNIX like workflows without thinking once to try out GNU/Linux.
At my university we only cared about Linux on its early days, Slackware 2.0 days, because naturally we couldn't have DG/UX at home, and that POSIX support was really unusable beyond toy examples.
No, this is giving him too much credit. His stance on gcc wasn't just purity over pragmatism, it was antithetical to Free Software. The entire point of Free Software is to let users modify the software to make it more useful to them, there is no point to Free Software if that freedom doesn't exist - I might as well use proprietary software then, it makes no difference.
Stallman fought tooth and nail to make gcc harder for the end user to modify, he directly opposed letting users make their tools better for them. He claims it was for the greater good, but in practice he was undermining the whole reason for free software to exit. And for what? It was all for nothing anyway, proprietary software hasn't relied on the compiler as the lynchpin of its strategy for decades.
It was a great start, but you need to adapt or you perish.
Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.
I, for one, am happy that there are still a couple of people here and there that you can really trust on this stuff.
That gave vendors more freedom and flexibility (to lock their software away from their customers.)
As usual, customers got less freedom and flexibility.
> They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary
This is not a given, even outside of compilers. It's a heck of a cope there.
I was responding to this, which is more widespread than GCC (although it was one of the first wins of the GNU).
There were various companies who wanted to add on backends and other bits to GCC, but wouldn’t due to the license. That’s one of the reasons LLVM is so popular.
But when this realization comes, it will be too late.
I think without GNU/Linux, most likely all UNIX vendors would have a better market share today.
With the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad that that didn't happen, even though I have mixed feelings about LLVM being permissively licensed.
There's an impedance mismatch between people who think gcc should have maximized user utility vs. the actual GNU philosophy. The actions of the gcc project make a lot of sense if you consider the FSF/GNU are monomaniacal about maximizing users freedoms, and not popularity, momentum or other ego-stroking metric.
GCC today has a very interesting license term, the GCC Runtime Library Exception, that makes the use of runtime libraries like libgcc free if-and-only-if you use an entirely Free Software toolchain to compile your code with; otherwise, you're subject to the terms of the GPL on libgcc and similar. That is a sensible pragmatic term, and if they'd come up with that term many years ago, they could have shipped libgccjit and other ways to plug into GCC years ago, and the programming language renaissance that arose due to LLVM might have been built atop GCC instead.
That would have been a net win for user freedoms. Instead, because they were so afraid of someone using an intermediate representation to work around GCC's license, and didn't do anything to solve that problem, LLVM is now the primary infrastructure people build new languages around, and GCC lost a huge amount of its relevance, and people now have less software freedom as a result.
You're right:
https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
> If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.
Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the decline of the influence of his own movement. It's not that "the GCC project" avoided that for ideological reason, Stallman was personally a veto on that issue for years, and his personal objection led to several people quitting the project for LLVM, with a couple saying as much directly to him.
https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...
(both threads are interesting reading in their entirety, not just those specific emails)