Bonum Certa Men Certa

Red Hat/IBM Got 'Tired' of RMS. Is It Getting 'Tired' of GPL/Copyleft Too?

Related: Diversity Comes in Many Forms

GCC and Fedora



Summary: After contributing to the cancellation of Richard Stallman (RMS) based on some falsehoods perpetuated in the media we're seeing the sort of thing one might expect from IBM (more so now that it totally controls Fedora and RHEL)

SOME hours ago Phoronix pointed out, based on this new page (preserved above as a screenshot as it's a wiki that can change frequently): "A feature proposal raised by Red Hat's Jeff Law would allow Fedora packages to be built under the LLVM Clang compiler rather than defaulting that all packages to be built under GCC. Clang-built packages would happen where the upstream software recommends using Clang by default or for software without an upstream to let the packager(s) make their own decision."



Jeff Law is a compilers geek.

Unless IBM intends to somehow (or some time down the line) replace GNU/copyleft/GCC with LLVM Clang, what's the point of this proposal? Well, take a wild guess. Consider where IBM stands on these issues, more so than Red Hat.

Having built a digital empire on top of GNU (lots of volunteer labour in the 1980s onwards), are they now drifting back to proprietary mindsets via "permissive" licensing (permitting going dark)? Of course it's also Microsoft-hosted (GitHub, proprietary)...

Maybe this is all innocent and benign; time will tell...

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