> I'm not sure how anyone can take RMS, and by extension the FSF that he controls, seriously anymore.
Well, if it makes you feel any better (or, alternatively, worse, I guess, in which case I apologize :(), I do (to be explicit: take RMS seriously). I didn't in 2002, which is part of why I can pull these examples do quickly: I considered Stallman an extremist and I found his definition of "freedom" confusing. I often had to cite these various email exchanges.
However, over the course of the last ten years of being a developer of open-source tools, I've entirely reversed my opinion. I have found myself more and more frustrated with the attitudes people take towards open source contributors, and I have seen the licenses on my open work become more and more defensive against these abuses (sometimes even using AGPL).
In fact, this whole Apple/Clang debacle was one of the things that pushed me over: this only became "a thing" when gcc moved to GPL3, and seems mostly about Apple wanting to maintain and expand a fully-closed ecosystem, not about technological advantages. In my opinion, the "great GPL purge" of Mac OS X is going to lead to some dire consequences on computing.
Android was designed to decouple GPL code from userspace because OEMs were scared of the "GPL contagion".
The recent Android NDK r8c (November 2012) includes clang 3.1 as an experimental alternative to gcc 4.6. This suggests that it may become the default in future versions of the Android NDK. If Google, like Apple, drops gcc for clang, which major commercial entities will be helping to fund gcc development?
Well, if it makes you feel any better (or, alternatively, worse, I guess, in which case I apologize :(), I do (to be explicit: take RMS seriously). I didn't in 2002, which is part of why I can pull these examples do quickly: I considered Stallman an extremist and I found his definition of "freedom" confusing. I often had to cite these various email exchanges.
However, over the course of the last ten years of being a developer of open-source tools, I've entirely reversed my opinion. I have found myself more and more frustrated with the attitudes people take towards open source contributors, and I have seen the licenses on my open work become more and more defensive against these abuses (sometimes even using AGPL).
In fact, this whole Apple/Clang debacle was one of the things that pushed me over: this only became "a thing" when gcc moved to GPL3, and seems mostly about Apple wanting to maintain and expand a fully-closed ecosystem, not about technological advantages. In my opinion, the "great GPL purge" of Mac OS X is going to lead to some dire consequences on computing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990