Re:Usability Improvements in GCC 15
by pjmlp on Thursday April 10, 2025 @12:17PM
(#43645424)
And FOSS folks most likely would like to enjoy those patches as well on their installations.
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Re:Usability Improvements in GCC 15
by umanwizard on Thursday April 10, 2025 @01:11PM
(#43646004)
And they do! You can choose not to contribute your changes back to permissively-licensed software, but in actual practice most people do contribute them. It's not like the Rust compiler is proprietary software with their own closed-source fork of LLVM...
> You can choose not to contribute your changes back to permissively-licensed software, but in actual practice most people do contribute them.
They contribute some things, sure. But the also don't contribute some things. It is hard to know how much because it's kept secret from all of us, even their own customers.
> "It's not like the Rust compiler is proprietary software with their own closed-source fork of LLVM..."
Rust no, hut there are a lot of proprietary, semi-incompatible proprietary forks out there.
I haven't advocated for re-licensing GCC to be permissively licensed. And patching GCC is necessarily going to be much easier for vendors than to build a new C front-end which generates GCC IR. So I'm not sure what difference you think what I'm proposing would make with regard to your concerns.