Last section on page 3: "GCC code lacks clarity (intermediate semantics are opaque) as a matter of policy, and that this has worked against the greater design goals of GCC.. By making just building onto GCC and GPLing the code the path of least resistance, RMS hopes to motivate more people to produce free software."
Last paragraph on page 4: "GCC 4.5 was released in April 2010. A major new feature is a plug-in facility for third party code. One of the first plug-ins on offer is DragonEgg, an LLVM back end for GCC."
Summary: Competition from LLVM has finally forced gcc to create a plugin architecture. It'll make less software free, but it'll get more people using gcc.
Keep in mind that when GNU/FSF say "free software," they really mean it's the software that's free, in an "Information wants to be free" sense. The software's freedom necessarily confers some liberties to you as well, but they still feel that software whose freedom can be taken away has a lesser quality of freedom than software that is guaranteed free forever. (You'd probably say the same about people — if your freedom can easily be abridged, it's worth less than inalienable freedom.)
That's not the sense I get from their manifestos. They seem to come more from a "freedom of end users to modify/share the software they receive" perspective, not the more cyberpunk information-wants-to-be-free perspective. The reason they like copyleft is because it makes it harder for a user's freedom to modify/share any software they receive to be restricted somewhere down the line: you're guaranteeing that not only are your immediate users given that freedom, but so are any indirect users of your software, via any derivative-works path.
You slightly misread what he said. He said it would make less software free, not that it was less free. One of the reasons GCC did not have a plug-in architecture was to make it so that if you wanted to do certain things with GCC, you were forced to make your code free. Now you can do some of these things without making your code free.
People that hold on to the GPL as their saviour believe that if one can take code, change it, and NOT have to give your changes back to the community it has made the code LESS free.
They don't look at the freedoms each license gives but just their own selfishness of wanting everything shared for the supposed greater good, when those of us in the BSD community really don't worry too much since most companies put back BSD licensed source code anyway since it is in their own best interest. Giving the companies a choice is something they can't fathom.
- Wasabi Systems (which contributed back less and less, except for journaling support just before it went down).
- BSDi (contributed almost zero, until they merged with FreeBSD Mall).
- Apple, contributes non of their differentiating technology back to the BSDs.
- Practically any closed-source system used the BSD TCP/IP stack at some point, few contributed back.
I loved the BSD license. I still love the Apache 2 License (which is very BSD-like). I was a developer in the NetBSD project. But as much as I dislike(d) the GPL, the license is very well able to make users contribute back. The Linux kernel has a very healthy pool of enterprise contributors. *BSD development is very much driven by free-time contributors and very small consultant firms. And it shows. It is great that such such a small pool of contributors can build great systems. But Linux has outdone BSD in many areas.
I know, it sucks, but it is true. Few people want to give competitors a carte blanche to start with your work, and keep improvements to themselves.
I don't know much about Wasabit Systems or BSDi. But gosh, get your Apple facts right.
a) Apple's kernel is open source: having used GPL would not have made any difference here
b) The other BSDs have openly stated that Apple contributed back and thanked them for it.
Not only that, there are a lot of open source technologies that Apple has contributed to or is the main company behind it. In fact to find an example you didn't need to go any further than LLVM (discussed in this article). Apple is the company most strongly behind LLVM: they could continue in house without contributing any of the source, but they don't (and why should they? What advantage would it give them?).
Finally and I think the most important thing, is to ask: had those technologies been GPLed, would the companies have contributed back (as you seem to expect), dumped it all on their website, or simply have refused to use that code?
"Finally and I think the most important thing, is to ask: had those technologies been GPLed, [...], or simply have refused to use that code?"
Yes, who would use (L)GPL code in their systems?
$ gcc -v
gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)
$ make -v
GNU Make 3.81
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
[...]
This program built for i386-apple-darwin10.0
$ troff -v
GNU troff (groff) version 1.19.2
It's true that LLVM and Webkit (based on KHTML, which was LGPL) are exceptions. However, it remains to be seen what they contribute back to LLVM in the future. Probably just those bits that will give them the tools edge.
LLVM is being developed by someone that Apple hired, why would they keep contributing back? Why wouldn't they have closed the doors on that back before the project got bigger? It is not in their best interest to do so.
The OpenBSM implementation in FreeBSD is based on the BSM code in Darwin.
Submitted by Apple to FreeBSD (apple.com email addresses)
Also, since all of this is BSD code, and those of us who developed under the BSD license agree to the fact that the code may be taken and used, and that works for us. Companies that know what is ultimately good for them will contribute back, maybe not all of their secret sauce so that they can continue to make money but at least part of it.
"Except for a necessary parts to make it useful. From someone close to the source (the last paragraph pretty much wraps it up)"
I am not sure what you are referring to. I'll try to reply to a few of the points raised in the article (but I have only skimmed it, so if I missed your point feel free to point it out).
Darwin is still being updated. Back in 2006 Apple didn't release the x86 code straight away, but I think they did so after a while.
DarwinBuild still exists and (apparently from their webpage) it is still being updated. This is a project supported by Apple whose only purpose is to build Darwin
As for Apple not including some of the drivers code in Darwin I can't say I am surprised. By looking at the fights between kernel people and drivers developers on Linux it seems a lot of companies (e.g NVidia) simply would not accept their secret sauce to be open sourced for fear it will reveal secrets of their architecture. Though correct me if I am wrong.
Finally the article you linked to asks why should people contribute to Darwin if Apple is less than helpful. Here I agree with you. Apple could do much more to help and encourage Darwin. But I don't see how this would be any different if the code were GPL.
And incidentally Android uses the same technique (keep development closed and open source the final version once it's being used) but everybody praises Android for being open source. (which is true, since they did open source _everything_ and Apple keeps things like Aqua closed source, but my point is that you don't hear quite the complains about Android's development model, as you do for Darwin's).
As for your second point, I think X-instance replied better than I could.
You prove my point: both companies, Apple with Darwin/OS X, and Google with Android are not really trying to develop a healthy ecosystem around these systems. But at the very least Google needs to provide the source to GPL'ed software (kernel modifications, etc.). If you have to publish changes anyway, at some point it becomes more attractive to work with upstream, since you cannot differentiate your product via that software. We still have to see if this happens, but there is a long of history of companies that did not contribute much initially, but are now working with kernel.org much more reliably. (E.g. many big-iron vendors.)
But from what I hear in the Linux world, having GPLed code didn't make all hardware producers write their own drivers and publish them. Some did, others released only simpler versions, and other didn't release anything and it was up to volunteer to do it.
Between this and a Darwin world where the latter group would release good drivers but keep them close sourced, I don't think there's any advantage for the community either way.
While I do agree that Apple is most definitely not trying to build a healthy ecosystem around Darwin (or in fact _any_ ecosystem at all...), Apple itself still publishes all of its Darwin code, and hence it would have complied with the licence had that been GPL. (the only exception being drivers but that's not up to Apple, as the situation in the Linux world showed).
Apple could have still kept Aqua and the rest closed source. So using Apple as an example of a company that took but didn't give back because of the licence seems wrong.
Last paragraph on page 4: "GCC 4.5 was released in April 2010. A major new feature is a plug-in facility for third party code. One of the first plug-ins on offer is DragonEgg, an LLVM back end for GCC."
Summary: Competition from LLVM has finally forced gcc to create a plugin architecture. It'll make less software free, but it'll get more people using gcc.