On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:26:16AM +0200, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote: > On 14 April 2010 23:34, Basile Starynkevitch <bas...@starynkevitch.net> wrote: > > > > And my personal preference on GCC licensing would be more a Linux-kernel > > like GPL with copyright belonging to authors employee (I don't feel a SCO > > like issue as a major threat today; it might have been ten years ago). That > > is much easier to get than a copyright transfer to FSF. > > I am sorry but I do not think the copyright transfer/ GCC license is > worth discussing in this list.
Then sorry for having discussed it. It was only my personal option. Discussion closed. > > And given the feedback provided by Grigori, the licensing issues are > very low in the list of complains from academia and the major > complaints are technical (speed, simplicity, and documentation). > > > And GCC is probably less threatened today by legal issues ą la SCO than by > > obesity, obsolescence, outside competition -eg LLVM- and perhaps even less > > interest by industry for the low level languages (C, C++, Ada) GCC is > > processing. Even in industry, scripting languages (or languages like Java or > > C# which are not practically significant for GCC) have more market share > > than a dozen years ago. > > You know there is a Java FE in GCC, don't you? Of course I do know about gcj. But I never met any person using it, and I don't know about any person or project really using it (as an example, I am not sure than any Debian or Fedora package is compiled with gcj into a native executable; do you know of many Debian packages compiled with GCJ specifically?). But I don't know much about Java (except practically Sun's JVM, IBM's one, and OpenJdk). > > And whether a language is significant or not for GCC is a question of > someone contributing a FE for it. I did not meant significant for GCC, I did meant significant for industrial use (outside of the GCC community). What I just believe is that programming languages usually compiled by GCC are a bit less used than ten years ago (in favor of scripting languages such as PHP). And it is the industrial importance of languages which I believe determine indirectly the work on GCC (because industrials are funding directly or indirectly, or at least are lobbying for, most of the labor put into GCC) > And calling Ada "low-level"... Honestly, let's stop this sub-thread > here. No more discussion about plugins or legal issues, please. Ok. Sorry for the inconvenience. (BTW I call lowlevel any language which does not manage memory automatically; I am quite fond of Ocaml even if I don't use it much today. So in my eyes C++, Ada95 & Fortran2005 are still low-level; this is only a matter of taste & terminology). Cheers -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faiencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***