GCC 4.2.1 Released

larry bagina writes "GCC 4.2.1 was released 4 days ago. Although this minor update would otherwise be insignificant, it will be the final GPL v2 release; all future releases will be GPL v3. Some key contributors are grumbling over this change and have privately discussed a fork to stay as GPL v2. The last time GCC forked (EGCS), the FSF conceded defeat. How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?"

Comments

Fact lite submission

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is opposing the transition to GPLv3 and why?

Re:Fact lite submission

[Rashkae]

As bad form as it is to reply to myself... 10 seconds of research leads me to this. Chalk me up as a GPL3 detractor. The license has no business dictating terms based on the usage of the product.. Either hardware lock is allowed or not.

I call bull.

[c0l0]

I'm very interested in everything Free Software, and have been following developments around GPLv3 and its adoption rather closely. Apart from some flaimbaits proclaiming how $CORP was going to abandon GCC (or anything else) after going for v3 of GPL, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting that this might actually be considered by anyone important - or in case there is, it wasn't visible enough for me to spot it.

So, user number 561269, would you please elaborate on the subject and cite any credible source supporting your view that a major contributor to GCC is considering to fork and "have it their way"? Your posting thoroughly lacks that kind of information right now, and therefore I think it deserves being tagged bogus or useless.

Thanks in advance for clearing this up.

- c0l0
(who's growing tired of all this anti-GPLv3-FUD swellig so much recently fast)

Re:I call bull.

[samkass]

I don't know of any fork of GCC happening, but I know that Apple now has their own C/C++/ObjC front-end to LLVM that can compile down to binary, and thus it seems will soon be able to avoid using GCC altogether. And since they appear to be prepared to open source it, perhaps there won't be a fork of GCC, but instead this may be the beginning of the end of GCC's dominance.

evolution in action

[oohshiny]

If the GPL v3 objections are real and widespread, then the GPL v2 forks will survive.

If the GPL v2 objections are unfounded or astroturfing, then the GPL v2 forks will die.

I think the grumbling will blow over; I don't see any serious problems with the GPL v3. In fact, the fact that GPL v3 is compatible with more open source licenses seems like a big advantage.

Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?

[NickFortune]

How does making a license freely available for software authors to use translate into "shoveling [sic] GPL3 down our throats"?

I suppose that a lot of free software authors feel that the FSF is being a little heavy handed. In fairness, it's hard to see how (after consultations lasting more than a year) that the foundation could have handled this better. All the same, there are inevitably going to be people who are not comfortable with the new licence. Given a choice of accept v3 or start a fork, it's perhaps inevitable that people who have invested a lot of effort in GNU projects are going to regard the licence as an imposition.

The new licence was always going to be divisive, although in the light of the MS-Novell pact, I think the benefits will be worthwhile in the long run. But that doesn't mean that devs on large projects like GCC don't have a valid point.

The trouble is that there's nothing now to be done about it, but to see how the dice fall.

Call all /. lawers (or not)

[inflex]

I'm a single-person software business, I don't hold any patents, I release by far a majority of my code under the BSD revised licence.

I -do- however have a portion of code that I keep locked up for a commercial application, if I start using a GPL v3 GCC will I be putting myself into peril?

Incidently, I'm not in the US, but well... sort of, I'm in Australia, which is almost as good as another US state *sigh*.

meanwhile, the evidence is missing

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

It's worth noting that the linked to article actually contains nothing about GCC developers complaining about GPLv3.

Re:Dual License

[SnowZero]

What does that even mean? Clearly, you need to re-read the GPL. The GPLv2 is *already* "dual licensed" (I put the term in quotes because it's nonsensical to talk about it as such) as GPLv3 by virtue of its "any future version" clause. Ahem, I think you need to reread the license. First, there are quite a few GPLv2-only projects out there, such as the Linux kernel. There is no requirement to include the "later version" statement in programs, as it is not a part of the actual license. The license statement/boilerplate says which license you use, but it is not the actual license (except in the case of short licenses like MIT, where the entire license is sometimes used as the boilerplate). This has been discussed in detail before on LKML and Debian-Legal, so I'm surprised you haven't heard of this. My particular projects are GPLv2-only at the moment, because I do not believe in supporting licenses which don't exist -- now that really is nonsense.

Furthermore, GCC requires assignment of copyright to the FSF, so the FSF has full say over what the license is. Nothing additional is required of contributors. I'm well aware of this. If you can find something in my post which is inconsistent with this, let me know. I was just giving my opinion on what I think most projects should do. Since all FSF projects require copyright assignment, they can do what they want, and meanwhile I can give my opinion.

I think you might want to consult with a lawyer about your own project's licenses, as well. I have talked with lawyers before on the licensing, although the GPL3 did not exist then so that wasn't the issue. As I stated before, the 2-vs-3 thing has been covered in quite a bit of depth elsewhere, and I'm pretty happy with what others have determined in their analyses. There are people out there using licenses they have never even read, so I think they might be more in need of a lawyer than I am. I don't make a living off my projects anyway, so I am not too worried about worst-case legal consequences causing me much harm.

It seems to me what you really want is to continue accepting contributions as GPLv2, but I can't actually make any sense out of what you are saying above. Modulo your different interpretation of the GPL license itself versus the license statement for a block of code, we seem to agree completely. I require contributions to be submitted as "GPL 2 or at your option any later version". Thus far I've released my compilation as GPLv2 only, for much the same reasons that the Linux kernel is released that way. Future versions will likely be GPLv2+GPLv3 (exercising my "or later" option to others' contributions).

Possibly, but not legal ones

[Chemisor]

I maintain a more or less portable OSS project (uSTL - an STL implementation) and I have had to make at least a few changes for each compiler release. Sometimes it happens due to new warnings that catch potential bugs I didn't know about. Sometimes it is due to policy changes (like the stricter aliasing rules in gcc 4), and sometimes there are new features I want to take advantage of.

Since I am strongly opposed to GPLv3 and anything that uses it, I am not going to upgrade my gcc any further than 4.2.1, which I'll probably do today. This means that uSTL, and my other five projects on SourceForge, may have problems compiling on later gcc releases, even though I will not intentionally put any incompatibilities in my code. Not being able to predict the future, I don't know whether these problems would be minor ones or major ones, but I do know that unless they expose some fundamental problem with my code, I will reject any bugs related to them and state explicitly that any gcc > 4.2.1 is not supported and never will be.

Now, you probably wouldn't care about this. After all, I only had a few thousand downloads - a minute fraction of the developers in the world. And you might say "oh, who needs this guy's code anyway?" But I have a feeling I'm not the only one, and I do occasionally contribute to projects other than my own. Perhaps you don't care if you lose my skills and the skills of all those other developers, but I suspect that they do all add up to quite a bit, and while you might not notice it at first, the GPLv3 camp might get lonelier and emptier as time passes.

Re:The threat...

[Nelson]

Mark maintains GCC. He's basically the project leader.

I read the GCC mailing list. I haven't heard or seen any grumbling. Nothing I'd call significant. The most grumbling I've read is on how to deal with the branching and labeling/versioning which always seems to be a GCC issue; it's a major release number with no new features, when major release number imply new features... Read this. There are closed branches of GCC, ones that vendors may add custom support for their hardware to, stuff like that, those people will have to change things. There was some discussion about how you license patches, purely an academic discussion on licensing though. Like I said, I haven't seen any grumbling and it simply doesn't affect end-users.

I also read LKML and I don't think that that is terribly significant, Linus brings up some points that seem to go un-addressed elsewhere. There is also some disagreement about how something like Linux goes through the process of being recopyrighted, you see there are people that are dead that have contributed large amounts of code. With Linux in particular, nobody was requested to re-assign their copyright to anyone like they are with GCC and a lot GNU projects. Really the only serious disagreement I've seen anywhere is from companies that exploit free software and are worried that they might have to share their substandard source code or rewrite the free components that make up the heart of their applications. Some of the hacks from the magazines are trying to stir the pot a little but that's it. It's unfortunate, some of the folks that really benefit the most from free software, folks that have products that exist because free software makes it possible for them to afford to make software, are now trying to attack and undermine the very software they depend upon.