The fear isn't that there will be competition, it is that there will be competition that sits on your back for the first 90% of the marathon and then outsprints you on the final 400m.

You are free to compete, but have run the whole marathon.

> The fear that someone else might be "better" than you so you're intentionally going to make it impossible for them to even compete is a really dumb argument. Imagine if this was done in sports.

It is done in sports. Most sports forbid you from taking drugs that enhance your performance, or are seggregated by sex in order to account for the "natural" (?) unequal distribution of muscular mass across sexes, because we think these would be unfair advantages.

The idea here is that the big proprietary software companies are not playing on a level field, since they are not disclosing their source code. The GPL, as I understand rms's intentions, is designed to inhibit that advantage and force everyone to play fairly: if you take code, you must give back code.

I don't understand much about the particulars of this case, and public opinion seems to be heavily slanted against rms. Nobody seems to agree with him here, but he's been considered a fool in the past when he was more of a Cassandra. His positions usually come from past experiences he's had.

Someone else mentioned elsewhere in this thread that historically the fear was of Intel using gcc as a frontend for icc. Seeing how Intel still contributes code to gcc and how they still maintain icc and how they still love publishing non-free software, perhaps this is still a valid fear. Or perhaps everyone is just using LLVM already for this purpose and it's not likely they would use gcc instead. I don't know.

I don't want to cast an opinion on this case beyond what I've already said. Maybe rms is wrong or maybe he's right.

"if you take code, you must give back code."

That's not the intention. It's a forward mechanism, not a backwards one. If you distribute code to person/company/entity X then you must also distribute the source code, or provide a way for X to get the source code.

If you make changes but never distribute the code then you don't need to distribute your modified code to anyone. If you only provide a service then you don't need distribute the code to anyone. Even if you modify gcc, sell me a copy, and distribute the changed source code to me, that doesn't mean you or I need to give the changes back to the gcc project.

The "fear", as I understand it, is that the Linux kernel and gcc are the two biggest GPL-based projects. If gcc is diminished, then fewer people will be aware of, much less agree with or advance, the ideals of software freedom. The technical advantages of gcc are used as marketing for software freedom.

Hiding GNU projects behind commercial and proprietary solutions front-ends reduces the marketing. Hence also the issue about "GNU/Linux" as "Linux" diminishes the marketing of the GNU project.

While incidentally true and pursuant to his real goal, I don't believe this is his ultimate goal. His goal is, and always has been, to make sure that you as the user of the software built upon his work, are always capable of opening it up and looking under the hood, and making adjustments as you see fit.

Throw a proprietory module on the end which relies on his work but gets around the GPL, and you've lost that right. That's not acceptable to him.

I believe you've just restated what I wrote.

Quoting from the Free Software Definition page at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html :

> You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.

There is nothing that obligates giving back code. Rather, that obligation is against the four freedoms of the free software. Hence, "if you take code, you must give back code" is not, as jordigh understood, one of rms's intentions.

True! Sorry, I was responding mostly to this phrase:

> If gcc is diminished, then fewer people will be aware of, much less agree with or advance, the ideals of software freedom. The technical advantages of gcc are used as marketing for software freedom.

"but he's been considered a fool in the past when he was more of a Cassandra."

But he's also now considered a fool in the past when he indeed turned out to be a fool. GNU has 3-4 marque projects, GCC etc., Gnu Emacs, userland, and HURD, and he has total control over at least the first two (and he personally has used the third only for ill, "GNU/Linux").

His stewardship of them has been all but catastrophic, he could have earned a lawsuit that he would have lost from how he started GNU Emacs (fortunately the rightsholders were menches). Both have had painful forks and are facing that again.

Intel is indeed moving to LLVM for this reason and being totally transparent about it.

From https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/05/27/why-we-cho...

--- LLVM is distributed under the Illinois Open Source License, which is nearly identical to the BSD license and is very open for use both by open-source and proprietary projects. Some other projects, such as Open64, are licensed under more restrictive licenses like the GPL, which were not compatible with our own licensing model. ---

So, what RMS feared is exactly what's happening with Clang, and he's right in terms of pushing the GPL to prevent this sort of thing.

Now, whether or not this is actually bad is another question. Personally, I think this sort of bleeding between proprietary and open source ultimately improves the ecosystem as a whole.

The fear is not that proprietary code will become better than FOSS code. The fear is that proprietary code will become better than previously-existing proprietary code. RMS considers closed-source code to be so immoral, that open-sourcing code in a way that proprietary code may potentially derive some benefit from it is immoral.