Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

During a discussion on the GCC mailing list about the comparative performance of GCC versus Clang, Richard Stallman weighed in to argue that LLVM's permissive license makes it a "terrible setback" for the free software community, because contributions to it benefit proprietary compilers as well as free ones. The original topic was Eric S. Raymond's suggestion that GCC should allow non-free plugins—an idea which, unsurprisingly, Stallman does not find appealing. "To make GCC available for such use would be throwing in the towel. If that enables GCC to 'win', the victory would be hollow, because it would not be a victory for what really matters: users' freedom."

