> I don't believe this is a strong argument. My contention is, and has > always been, that GCC is _already_ trivial to integrate into a > proprietary compiler. There is at least one compiler I know that does this.
I believe that any such compiler would violate the GPL. But I also believe it's not in the best interest of the FSF to litigate that matter if the linkage between the compiler is anything other than linked in a single executable. Therefore, I think it's important for us to make it as technically hard as possible for people to do such a linkage by readin and writing tree or communicating as different libraries or DLLs. I'm very much against any sort of "plug in" precisely for this reason. > IMO, the benefits we gain in making GCC a more attractive code base, far > outweigh the fears of someone co-opting it for their own proprietary uses. That depends on the importance you attach to the philosophy of free software. I suspect RMS attaches much more importance to that than anybody on this list.
