GCC, LLVM, Copyleft, Companies, and Non-Profits

[ Please keep in mind in reading this post that while both FSF and Conservancy are mentioned, and that I have leadership roles at both organizations, these opinions on ebb.org, as always, are my own and don't necessarily reflect the view of FSF and/or Conservancy. ]

Most people know I'm a fan of RMS' writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS' post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It's clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.

Firstly, I'm troubled to see so many developers, including GCC developers, conflating various social troubles in the GCC community with the choice of license. I think it's impossible to deny that culturally, the GCC community faces challenges, like any community that has lasted for so long. Indeed, there's a long political history of GCC that even predates my earliest involvement with the Free Software community (even though I'm now considered an old-timer in Free Software in part because I played a small role — as a young, inexperienced FSF volunteer — in helping negotiate the EGCS fork back into the GCC mainline).

But none of these politics really relate to GCC's license. The copyleft was about ensuring that there were never proprietary improvements to the compiler, and AFAIK no GCC developers ever wanted that. In fact, GCC was ultimately the first major enforcement test of the GPL, and ironically that test sent us on the trajectory that led to the current situation.

Specifically, as I've spoken about in my many talks on GPL compliance, the earliest publicly discussed major GPL violation was by NeXT computing when Steve Jobs attempted and failed (thanks to RMS' GPL enforcement work) to make the Objective C front-end to GCC proprietary. Everything for everyone involved would have gone quite differently if that enforcement effort had failed.

As it stands, copyleft was upheld and worked. For years, until quite recently (in context of the history of computing, anyway), Apple itself used and relied on the Free Software GCC as its primary and preferred Objective C compiler, because of that enforcement against NeXT so long ago. But, that occurrence also likely solidified Jobs' irrational hatred of copyleft and software freedom, and Apple was on a mission to find an alternative compiler — but writing a compiler is difficult and takes time.

Meanwhile, I should point out that copyleft advocates sometimes conflate issues in analyzing the situation with LLVM. I believe most LLVM developers when they say that they don't like proprietary software and that they want to encourage software freedom. I really think they do. And, for all of us, copyleft isn't a religion, or even a belief — it's a strategy to maximize software freedom, and no one (AFAICT) has said it's the only viable strategy to do that. It's quite possible the strategy of LLVM developers of changing the APIs quickly to thwart proprietarization might work. I really doubt it, though, and here's why:

I'll concede that LLVM was started with the best of academic intentions to make better compiler technology and share it freely. (I've discussed this issue at some length with Chris Lattner directly, and I believe he actually is someone who wants more software freedom in the world, even if he disagrees with copyleft as a strategy.) IMO, though, the problem we face is exploitation by various anti-copyleft, software-freedom-unfriendly companies that seek to remove every copyleft component from any software stack. Their reasons for pursuing that goal may or may not be rational, but its collateral damage has already become clear: it's possible today to license proprietary improv