FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback'

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has called LLVM a terrible setback in a new mailing list exchange over GCC vs. Clang. LLVM continues to be widely used and grow in popularity for different uses, but it's under a BSD-style license rather than the GPL. RMS wrote, 'For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance. The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers — so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us.'"

Comments

Freedom?

[ArbitraryName]

Richard Stallman is a terrible setback to freedom.

Re:NOW he realizes this?

[ciaran_o_riordan]

> feeding back their changes upstream, despite not having to.

For Apple's plan to work, yes, they have to. For the moment.

Taking users and developers away from GCC is main point, so they have to get FreeBSD to switch, and get some of the free software community to switch, etc.

The goal is not about having a great free software compiler. If that was the goal, they would have just continued with GCC.

And if Apple's funding was about helping free software, they would have funded development of something we didn't already have.