GCC has resisted modularity for a while because of concerns about enabling proprietary plugins; an unfortunate case of letting ideology come before technical excellence. This left a big unmet need and put LLVM in a stronger position to displace GCC purely on technical merit, by offering this capability that GCC didn't want to offer.
Reading that article from lwn.net is amazing. The irony of the gcc community users screwing over their customers in order to preserve their ideology, and its parallel in the 'commercial' software business is really amazing. Seriously. "We won't make plug-ins because that would open the door to making money on GCC" vs "We require a key disk to prevent folks from copying our software and using it for free."
'Screwing over their customers'? Who are these 'customers'? If you are talking about end users then I fail to see how they are to be served by enhancements being kept in proprietary plugins (which are the historical reasons behind the objection against plugins, which in turn can be illustrated by the attempts of Steve Jobs who while at NeXT tried to circumvent the GPL to have it as a backend for his proprietary ObjC frontend).
The whole point of GCC is to have a complete compiler toolchain where all the enhancements are being made available to _all_ end users. Catering for companies who wants a free strong frontend/backend on which to develop their proprietary extensions is obviously NOT what FSF is interested in and I personally agree with their 'ideology' in this case as the last thing I want to see is a situation where developers keep their enhancements proprietary (likely due to the wishes of their companies who see no gain in releasing those enhancements and instead wants to keep those enhancements as a competitive edge).
Also I like how GCC enforces patent protection grants to be given by code contributors, something which LLVM does not and I fear is something which could open a big can of worms later down the road.
Off course, scoffing at the 'ideology' which lead to the creation of the toolchain that is fueling pretty much the entire open source ecosystem not to mention lots of proprietary projects aswell makes you look pretty stupid in my book. Also GPL is obviously a licence through which numerous companies find it agreeable to cooperatively develop code, hence the success of Linux and GCC.
Ok, so the point is subtle and perhaps not easily communicated. This example is good though.
"The whole point of GCC is to have a complete compiler toolchain where all the enhancements are being made available to _all_ end users." ... "the last thing I want to see is a situation where developers keep their enhancements proprietary."
I believe you have correctly expressed a consensus opinion of why it would be 'bad' to allow proprietary plugins. And your claim posits a reason:
"(likely due to the wishes of their companies who see no gain in releasing those enhancements and instead wants to keep those enhancements as a competitive edge)."
Which is also a common reason given.
However what if there was a different reason? What if there is some capability that could be created with a plug-in that is pretty specialized, further that plug-in would require specialized domain knowledge and would only be of use to a small number of GCC users.
Traditionally the way the market has created such things is that a person invests their time to create the capability, and they charge a fraction of what it cost them to others to use the capability. The compute the fraction to offset the cost of developing it, and the community benefits by getting access to this capability for a fraction of what it would cost to develop in house, and the developer benefits by having the cost of their efforts covered by the community.
In a GPL world where the work would be considered derivative, you remove the opportunity for people to charge for their work, and thus you remove the economic motivation for getting something built. This damages the community as a whole with a somewhat 'invisible' "didn't go there" sort of damage (you only miss something if you had it and then you don't, not if you never had it). It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
I completely understand the motivation behind the FSF and GCC communities for wanting to keep GCC available for all.
But you have to also note that people who sell software make very much the same arguments in defense of copy protection. They (the software producers) argue that they want everyone to have the same experience and they can't control that experience if people are out there making bootleg copies and changes they don't know about. So they deny something their customers want "software unburdened by loathsome copy protection" to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software.
So if the FSF and GCC communities are denying something their customers want "modularized GCC tools for easy customization through plug-ins" in order to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software, well it strikes me as ironic.
[1] Sorry for inflammatory way that sounds, my thesaurus is coming up blank on terms that mean 'something which kills an existing organism and keeps it dead'. Using 'nuke' seemed worse.
You're wrong that the GPL prohibits one from selling software as software. It doesn't. It does make it harder, because anyone can come in and buy one copy to distribute to everyone else, but this happens very often in the non-open-source world too. Maybe you've heard of pirates?
The only difference is legal ability to sue, but then again when your unwanted re-distributors/pirates are the masses whose real-world identities are hard to discover, this difference doesn't mean that much. You can also gain some (though not all) of the same legal rights to sue unwanted re-distributors by trademarking your application, which forces any re-distributors to have to redistribute under a different name (CentOS instead of RedHat) which puts them at a marketing disadvantage.
Is your example of developing a niche feature for a niche domain really the traditional way? I guess so, but since the GPL has been around there have been numerous examples of what-would-have-been-proprietary features still being developed, released, and open sourced. e.g. if you own all the copyright to a GPL program, some niche domain representative can come along and you can sell them a non-GPL license to develop their addon for which they can then resell. As another e.g., look at all the companies who have contributed to the Linux Kernel. The company wants a particular feature because they can use it to make money for some other reason, so they pay developers to write the code which then gets GPL'd. The company still makes money from the code, the developers make money by writing the code, and the users directly, obviously benefit from the code being there as opposed to the company having estimated indirect guesses at how much value they could capture by selling the code for what the market could bear.
Edit: I do agree with you about the irony, though.
>It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
Obviously GPL 'poisons' the market for derivative _proprietary_ tools. The whole idea behind GPL is that the end user should have the right to get the source code. If the only way to charge for your work is through artifical scarcity by hiding the source code then no, you can't do that as a derivative of someone else's GPL licenced code.
If we are talking about your own code, then obviously you can licence it both as GPL and offer it through other agreements aswell. Take x264 for instance, the devs are making good money by offering it through a proprietary licence for those who doesn't want to open their source while making it freely available for open source projects under GPL.
And your copy protection analogy is hypocritical. GPL actually prevents the artificial scarcity employed by copy protection, contrary to the market example you described where someone won't create a GCC plugin because they can't keep it proprietary and thus employ artificial scarcity.
There's no point in arguing against GPL not working with proprietary code given that GPL was created to prevent working with proprietary code. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to make money with GPL licenced code, only that you can't do that through A) limiting the number of copies the recipient can make of the software, B) denying the recipient the source code should he/she request it.
Obviously this prevents the most traditional way of making money from software which is through artificial scarcity (except the case of when it's truly _your_ code, then you can offer other agreements apart from GPL as in the case with x264), however other ways of making money off open source has emerged like that of Red Hat.
edit: I do agree though that disallowing plugins is ultimately not the way to go since there's alot of possibilities that they offer (and no, I'm not talking about proprietary plugins of which I couldn't care less) and I'm glad that GCC now has a plugin-architecture.
This is backwards. GCC and the GNU project as a whole exist because proprietary software was "screwing over its customers" in ways rms and the other early FSF people couldn't accept. The "ideology" of free software is (and always has been) the primary motivation, not the "customer" or "technical excellence".
You can flame over that if you like (but please don't: just google the older flame wars from the 90's, this is depressingly well-travelled ground), but don't get confused over the motivations of the actors. The FSF has been nothing if not crystal clear about their priorities.
Not backwards, I think you got it. I lived through the flame wars in the 90s and really resonate with the message "Give us the damn source so we can change it to do what we want!"
The irony is that if folks are trying to check in changes into the GCC tree that allow for plug-in modules because that is what they want, and the community is denying those commits because they fear having a plug-in architecture would enable other people to do bad things. Well that is ironic that such changes would be denied based on a potential transgression for some of the users.
When I read the argument it sounded like what folks had been arguing on the other side back in the 90's, hence the irony.
I don't think they were worried about people making money on GCC (you can sell various services built around it, even proprietary IDEs that call out to it, etc.). They were more worried that it would open the door to GCC becoming no longer all-free: users might find that, like with the Linux kernel before the "no unfree firmware" crusade, they de-facto had to use proprietary modules to get various things working, despite the core being free. The hope of the GCC devs was that by making it a choice of "open-source it and link, or don't come at all", they would push at least a few would've-been-proprietary-modules into becoming free software in order to be able to work with GCC.
Whether it worked or not, I'm not sure. The copyleft strategy's success is a fairly complex game-theory problem that's pretty specific to the costs/benefits/alternatives of each party in each situation. The whole point is to try to force a sort of quid pro quo: you can use my free software as long as you open up yours too. As with any quid-pro-quo proposal, whether the other person accepts depends on a lot of factors.
edit: digging for some examples, I think the D front-end may have been open-sourced as a result of that policy, to give D a second compilation route (besides the official Digital Mars D compiler).
Comments
GCC has resisted modularity for a while because of concerns about enabling proprietary plugins; an unfortunate case of letting ideology come before technical excellence. This left a big unmet need and put LLVM in a stronger position to displace GCC purely on technical merit, by offering this capability that GCC didn't want to offer.
http://lwn.net/Articles/301135/
Reading that article from lwn.net is amazing. The irony of the gcc community users screwing over their customers in order to preserve their ideology, and its parallel in the 'commercial' software business is really amazing. Seriously. "We won't make plug-ins because that would open the door to making money on GCC" vs "We require a key disk to prevent folks from copying our software and using it for free."
'Screwing over their customers'? Who are these 'customers'? If you are talking about end users then I fail to see how they are to be served by enhancements being kept in proprietary plugins (which are the historical reasons behind the objection against plugins, which in turn can be illustrated by the attempts of Steve Jobs who while at NeXT tried to circumvent the GPL to have it as a backend for his proprietary ObjC frontend).
The whole point of GCC is to have a complete compiler toolchain where all the enhancements are being made available to _all_ end users. Catering for companies who wants a free strong frontend/backend on which to develop their proprietary extensions is obviously NOT what FSF is interested in and I personally agree with their 'ideology' in this case as the last thing I want to see is a situation where developers keep their enhancements proprietary (likely due to the wishes of their companies who see no gain in releasing those enhancements and instead wants to keep those enhancements as a competitive edge).
Also I like how GCC enforces patent protection grants to be given by code contributors, something which LLVM does not and I fear is something which could open a big can of worms later down the road.
Off course, scoffing at the 'ideology' which lead to the creation of the toolchain that is fueling pretty much the entire open source ecosystem not to mention lots of proprietary projects aswell makes you look pretty stupid in my book. Also GPL is obviously a licence through which numerous companies find it agreeable to cooperatively develop code, hence the success of Linux and GCC.
Ok, so the point is subtle and perhaps not easily communicated. This example is good though.
"The whole point of GCC is to have a complete compiler toolchain where all the enhancements are being made available to _all_ end users." ... "the last thing I want to see is a situation where developers keep their enhancements proprietary."
I believe you have correctly expressed a consensus opinion of why it would be 'bad' to allow proprietary plugins. And your claim posits a reason:
"(likely due to the wishes of their companies who see no gain in releasing those enhancements and instead wants to keep those enhancements as a competitive edge)."
Which is also a common reason given.
However what if there was a different reason? What if there is some capability that could be created with a plug-in that is pretty specialized, further that plug-in would require specialized domain knowledge and would only be of use to a small number of GCC users.
Traditionally the way the market has created such things is that a person invests their time to create the capability, and they charge a fraction of what it cost them to others to use the capability. The compute the fraction to offset the cost of developing it, and the community benefits by getting access to this capability for a fraction of what it would cost to develop in house, and the developer benefits by having the cost of their efforts covered by the community.
In a GPL world where the work would be considered derivative, you remove the opportunity for people to charge for their work, and thus you remove the economic motivation for getting something built. This damages the community as a whole with a somewhat 'invisible' "didn't go there" sort of damage (you only miss something if you had it and then you don't, not if you never had it). It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
I completely understand the motivation behind the FSF and GCC communities for wanting to keep GCC available for all.
But you have to also note that people who sell software make very much the same arguments in defense of copy protection. They (the software producers) argue that they want everyone to have the same experience and they can't control that experience if people are out there making bootleg copies and changes they don't know about. So they deny something their customers want "software unburdened by loathsome copy protection" to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software.
So if the FSF and GCC communities are denying something their customers want "modularized GCC tools for easy customization through plug-ins" in order to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software, well it strikes me as ironic.
[1] Sorry for inflammatory way that sounds, my thesaurus is coming up blank on terms that mean 'something which kills an existing organism and keeps it dead'. Using 'nuke' seemed worse.
You're wrong that the GPL prohibits one from selling software as software. It doesn't. It does make it harder, because anyone can come in and buy one copy to distribute to everyone else, but this happens very often in the non-open-source world too. Maybe you've heard of pirates?
The only difference is legal ability to sue, but then again when your unwanted re-distributors/pirates are the masses whose real-world identities are hard to discover, this difference doesn't mean that much. You can also gain some (though not all) of the same legal rights to sue unwanted re-distributors by trademarking your application, which forces any re-distributors to have to redistribute under a different name (CentOS instead of RedHat) which puts them at a marketing disadvantage.
Is your example of developing a niche feature for a niche domain really the traditional way? I guess so, but since the GPL has been around there have been numerous examples of what-would-have-been-proprietary features still being developed, released, and open sourced. e.g. if you own all the copyright to a GPL program, some niche domain representative can come along and you can sell them a non-GPL license to develop their addon for which they can then resell. As another e.g., look at all the companies who have contributed to the Linux Kernel. The company wants a particular feature because they can use it to make money for some other reason, so they pay developers to write the code which then gets GPL'd. The company still makes money from the code, the developers make money by writing the code, and the users directly, obviously benefit from the code being there as opposed to the company having estimated indirect guesses at how much value they could capture by selling the code for what the market could bear.
Edit: I do agree with you about the irony, though.
>It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
Obviously GPL 'poisons' the market for derivative _proprietary_ tools. The whole idea behind GPL is that the end user should have the right to get the source code. If the only way to charge for your work is through artifical scarcity by hiding the source code then no, you can't do that as a derivative of someone else's GPL licenced code.
If we are talking about your own code, then obviously you can licence it both as GPL and offer it through other agreements aswell. Take x264 for instance, the devs are making good money by offering it through a proprietary licence for those who doesn't want to open their source while making it freely available for open source projects under GPL.
And your copy protection analogy is hypocritical. GPL actually prevents the artificial scarcity employed by copy protection, contrary to the market example you described where someone won't create a GCC plugin because they can't keep it proprietary and thus employ artificial scarcity.
There's no point in arguing against GPL not working with proprietary code given that GPL was created to prevent working with proprietary code. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to make money with GPL licenced code, only that you can't do that through A) limiting the number of copies the recipient can make of the software, B) denying the recipient the source code should he/she request it.
Obviously this prevents the most traditional way of making money from software which is through artificial scarcity (except the case of when it's truly _your_ code, then you can offer other agreements apart from GPL as in the case with x264), however other ways of making money off open source has emerged like that of Red Hat.
edit: I do agree though that disallowing plugins is ultimately not the way to go since there's alot of possibilities that they offer (and no, I'm not talking about proprietary plugins of which I couldn't care less) and I'm glad that GCC now has a plugin-architecture.
This is backwards. GCC and the GNU project as a whole exist because proprietary software was "screwing over its customers" in ways rms and the other early FSF people couldn't accept. The "ideology" of free software is (and always has been) the primary motivation, not the "customer" or "technical excellence".
You can flame over that if you like (but please don't: just google the older flame wars from the 90's, this is depressingly well-travelled ground), but don't get confused over the motivations of the actors. The FSF has been nothing if not crystal clear about their priorities.
Not backwards, I think you got it. I lived through the flame wars in the 90s and really resonate with the message "Give us the damn source so we can change it to do what we want!"
The irony is that if folks are trying to check in changes into the GCC tree that allow for plug-in modules because that is what they want, and the community is denying those commits because they fear having a plug-in architecture would enable other people to do bad things. Well that is ironic that such changes would be denied based on a potential transgression for some of the users.
When I read the argument it sounded like what folks had been arguing on the other side back in the 90's, hence the irony.
I don't think they were worried about people making money on GCC (you can sell various services built around it, even proprietary IDEs that call out to it, etc.). They were more worried that it would open the door to GCC becoming no longer all-free: users might find that, like with the Linux kernel before the "no unfree firmware" crusade, they de-facto had to use proprietary modules to get various things working, despite the core being free. The hope of the GCC devs was that by making it a choice of "open-source it and link, or don't come at all", they would push at least a few would've-been-proprietary-modules into becoming free software in order to be able to work with GCC.
Whether it worked or not, I'm not sure. The copyleft strategy's success is a fairly complex game-theory problem that's pretty specific to the costs/benefits/alternatives of each party in each situation. The whole point is to try to force a sort of quid pro quo: you can use my free software as long as you open up yours too. As with any quid-pro-quo proposal, whether the other person accepts depends on a lot of factors.
edit: digging for some examples, I think the D front-end may have been open-sourced as a result of that policy, to give D a second compilation route (besides the official Digital Mars D compiler).
(NeXT's Objective-C front-end is also a commonly cited example.)