On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 07:37:10PM -0700, Daniel Berlin wrote: > "The steering committee was founded in 1998 with the intent of > preventing any particular individual, group or organization from > getting control over the project. Its primary purpose is to make major > decisions in the best interests of the GCC project and to ensure that > the project adheres to its fundamental principles found in the > project's mission statement. [see the original announcement below]."
The purpose of that statement (which dates from egcs days), was to address concerns that egcs represented a Cygnus takeover of GCC. egcs started before the Red Hat acquisition of Cygnus, and it started with the Cygnus "devo tree" with a Cygnus employee as RM, and some Cygnus marketing people at the time were actually telling customers that it *did* represent a Cygnus takeover, so they had to have a Cygnus support contract if they wanted any influence over egcs! Fortunately those people were quickly slapped down. And after the Cygnus/Red Hat merger, the rest of the community was worried about the 800 pound gorilla. > 1. The FSF, as an organization, clearly now has control over the project. > You even liken them to the administration of which you are just a subordinate. > You also believe you must act in accordance with their policy or > resign from the group supposed to be making the major decisions in the > best interests of the GCC project. Even in the egcs days, every contributor signed over their copyright to their contributions to the FSF, so even then the FSF played a special role. Many of the contributors worked (and still work) for organizations that compete with each other: if there weren't some nonprofit with legal ownership of the code one would have had to be invented. There are checks on FSF control in the sense that the project can be forked and developers can leave. But in this particular case, I'm hopeful that this holdup is going to be resolved soon; there's new language and meetings this weekend which I hope will resolve matters, and the new language is designed to fix problems raised on this list by GCC developers. Most of the time, the FSF hasn't interfered with GCC except on a couple of matters that they care about; licensing is one such matter. I wish the FSF had simply asked us to hold the final release and not the branch, as it would have made life a lot easier.
