News: The FreeBSD Foundation announces Java downloads.
Interview with Devon O'Dell and Jason Dixon at the LinuxWorld Expo in Boston.
Talking about the BSD family of free operating systems.
Talking about the BSD family of free operating systems.
What do you think are we compromising by using a GPL compiler (gcc) to compile BSD-licensed code? The input and output of a GPL program is not affected by the GPL at all.
ReplyDeleteOr do you mean you would rather have a BSD-licensed C compiler instead of gcc? In that case, I would say the quality of gcc outweighs the "restrictions" of the GPL. Re-implementing something like gcc is not exactly easy, so I don't see a lot of benefit from re-implementing it just so it can be put under a BSD license. Actually, it may be less work to convince RMS et al. to re-license gcc ;-)
I think the proposed GPL version 3 includes some clauses that a lot of people didn't like. One clause said that it couldn't be used to compile software that provides DRM, which does effect the output of the program. I assume that gcc will be released under GPLv3 in the future, but who knows what the final form of the new version will look like.
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