The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source

Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by pjc50 on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @08:35AM (#7709762)

GCC is (unsurprisingly) copyleft and incredibly mainstream. QPL patch requirements are a big hassle for distros, although Debian has special casing in dpkg building to handle it.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by Pacabel on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @05:58PM (#7712882)

GCC's traction is mainly due to it being, for a very long time, the most complete and widely-ported open source compiler system available.

Its competitors tended to be expensive commercial options, or comparatively limited open source projects. Any individual or organization wanting to use an advanced, yet free, compiler system generally ended up with GCC by default.

It wasn't GCC's licensing that attracted them. In fact, its licensing ended up being a liability, especially for commercial users. That's why we've seen LLVM and Clang really take off lately. They started to not only match the functionality of GCC, but did so with a far more flexible licensing approach. This made them a much more appealing set of tools for many users, both commercial and open source.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by pjc50 on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @06:27PM (#7712987)

Clang/LLVM are also much easier to work with architecturally, as well as being 20 years newer and offering new ways of using IL; difficult to control for that variable.

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