Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>]

On Apr 26, 2010, at 12:23 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com> writes:
> 
>> w.r.t. "hoarding", I'll point out that (in the context of GCC) being
>> able to enforce copyright is pretty useless IMO.  While you can
>> force someone to release their code, the GPL doesn't force them to
>> assign the copyright to the FSF.  In practice this means that you
>> can force someone to release their GCC changes, but you can't merge
>> them back to mainline GCC.  In a warped way you could argue that the
>> FSF using the GPL encourages their software to fork :-)
> 
> Again, just for the record.  History shows that this is not entirely
> useless.  People at NeXT wrote the Objective C frontend to GCC.  They
> did not intend to release the source code.  The FSF objected.  In the
> end, NeXT wound up contributing the code, and that is why GCC has an
> Objective C frontend.  In other words, the whole process worked as the
> GPL intended.

This is a often repeated example, but you're leaving out the big part of the story (at least as far as I know).  The license *did not* force the ObjC frontend to be merged back into GCC, there were other factors at work.  This 'victory' has nothing to do with the license, but it did cause them to release the code.

Beyond that, the changes to support Objective C 2.0 (and later) have never been merged back in, despite being published and widely available under the GPL.  Also, the GNU runtime and the NeXT runtimes are wildly incompatible, and the ObjC frontend in GCC is one of the most disliked (I'll leave out the pejoratives :) because its design has not kept up with the other front-ends.

Even in the shining example of the GPL succeeding, are you sure it was a good thing in retrospect? :)  

-Chris