This argument has been had thousands of times across thousands of forums and mailing lists in the preceding decades and we're unlikely to settle it here on the N + 1th iteration, but the short version of my own argument is that the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best. That's how it got started in the first place (see the origin story about Stallman and the Printer).

Stallman's insistence that gcc needed to be deliberately made worse to keep evil things from happening ran completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre. Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked, but it didn't: it just made everyone pack up and leave for LLVM instead, which easily could've been predicted and reduced gcc's leverage over the software ecosystem. So it was user-hostile, anti-freedom behavior for no benefit.

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1718627440 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best

Yes?

> completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre

I can't follow your argument. You said yourself, that his point is the freedom of the *end user*, not the compiler vendor. He has no leverage on the random middle man between him and the end user other than adjusting his release conditions (aka. license).

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Analemma_ 6 days ago | parent [-]

I'm speaking here as an end user of gcc, who might want e.g. to make a nice code formatting plugin which has to parse the AST to work properly. For a long time, Stallman's demand was that gcc's codebase be as difficult, impenetrable, and non-modular as possible, to prevent companies from bolting a closed-source frontend to the backend, and he specifically opposed exporting the AST, which makes a whole bunch of useful programming tools difficult or impossible.

Whatever his motivations were, I don't see a practical difference between "making the code deliberately bad to prevent a user from modifying it" and something like Tivoization enforced by code signing. Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose.

	▲	tmtvl 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose. ...What? It's licensed under the GPL, of course you can modify the code if you find it unfit for purpose. If it weren't Free Software you might not have been able to do so as the source code might be kept from you.

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kelnos 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked

It did work, though, for 15 years or so. Maybe that was or wasn't enough to be worth it, I don't know.

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pessimizer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have no idea what you think "gcc's leverage" would be if it were a useless GPL'd core whose only actively updated front and back ends are proprietary. Turning gcc into Android would be no victory for software freedom.