Windows Store and the GPL

Re:Windows Store and the GPL by rodgerd on Thursday November 22, 2012 @03:51PM (#4819944)

Richard Stallman tells a story (or did when I saw him give a lecture a decade or so ago) about Steve Jobs approaching him to do a deal on allowing NeXT to keep the GCC Objective C front end closed; rms explained that wasn't going to happen, and NeXT would have to GPL it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's enthusiasm for LLVM and distaste for GPL code stems from that incident.

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Re:Windows Store and the GPL by Someone on Thursday November 22, 2012 @05:20PM (#4820222)

For the history buffs:

  - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/gnu.gcc/NeXT$20and$20copyleft

  - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/gnu.gcc/Objective-C$20front$20end$20for$20GCC$20from$20NeXT

I do not see Steve mentioned anywhere (http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/OSCON-2011/compliance.html makes that link, but IMO lacks argumentation).

It is hard to tell, but it seems that there were a few months where a pure preprocessor was (getting?) integrated into gcc, where the idea was to ship gcc sources with a NeXT licensed library to users, and have those users do the linking step, thus preventing NeXT from breaking the GPL. One could argue that this was one of the things that, eventually, led to the library exception to the GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Vers...)

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