On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:52 AM BST, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Christopher Dimech via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear. When people
> > at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use it,
> > and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute
> > it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> > enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
>
> Actually, some of us did *exactly* those things late in the last
> century.
>
> One of the challenges I faced in my early famous years was persuading
> the hacker culture as a whole to treat the profit-centered parts of the
> economy as allies rather than enemies.
>
> I won't say that a *majority* of us were resistent to this, but I
> did have to work hard on the problem for a while, between 1997
> and about 2003.
ESR,
My criticism has nothing to do with profit and everything to do with
accountability. GCC is a project which is used by almost everyone in the
ecosystem, and whose future direction is important to almost everyone in
the ecosystem. Right now, the ultimate oversight of GCC sits with GNU &
FSF -- both institutions with a mandate to represent the ecosystem based
on level of membership and time spent fighting for free software.
GCC forking away from those institutions removes that oversight, and
unless something which is equally or more representative is brought in to
replace that oversight role, I find it difficult to believe that this
doesn't represent a huge step backwards in terms of who ultimately has
an input into the future direction of GCC. It should be, at the very
minimum, challenging for representatives of Google, Red Hat and other
corporations to convince anyone -- after wrestling the project away from
GCC -- that their interests are not at odds with GCC users'.
I would say *exactly* the same thing if you replaced Google/Red Hat with
nonprofits which have less trust in free software than GNU/FSF.
>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
