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LLVM/Clang is evolving more quickly than and is a much richer base for innovation than GCC is. LLVM spawned Rust, Swift, and Zig. The most recent GCC languages are Spark and COBOL.

One of the reasons that LLVM has been able to evolve so quickly is because of all the corporate contribution it gets.

GCC users want Clang/LLVM users to know how dumb they are for taking advantage of all the voluntary corporate investment in Clang/LLVM because, if you just used GCC instead, corporate contributions would be involuntary.

The GPL teaches us that we are not really free unless we have taken choice away from the developers and contributors who provide the code we use. This is the “fifth freedom”.

The “four freedoms” that the Free Software Foundation talks about are all provided by MIT and BSD. Those only represent “partial freedom”.

Only the GPL makes you “fully free” by providing the “fifth freedom”—-freedom to claim ownership over code other people will write in the future.

Sure, the “other people” are less free. But that is the price that needs to be paid for our freedom. Proper freedom (“full freedom”) is always rooted in the subjugation of others.




GPL gives more freedom to software users. BSD gives more freedom to software developers.

I think that's the core difference.


Amazon and the like appreciate indeed their freedom not to contribute back, while pumping the cash register.


Some slaves were treated well, fed nicely and overall had rather good life. Yet, they remained slaves, so master could take all of that from them at any moment.

But hey, if you try hard to be nice to your master and do not demand anything, for sure they will always treat you well!




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