Chris Lattner <clatt...@apple.com> writes: > w.r.t. "hoarding", I'll point out that (in the context of GCC) being > able to enforce copyright is pretty useless IMO. While you can > force someone to release their code, the GPL doesn't force them to > assign the copyright to the FSF. In practice this means that you > can force someone to release their GCC changes, but you can't merge > them back to mainline GCC. In a warped way you could argue that the > FSF using the GPL encourages their software to fork :-)
Again, just for the record. History shows that this is not entirely useless. People at NeXT wrote the Objective C frontend to GCC. They did not intend to release the source code. The FSF objected. In the end, NeXT wound up contributing the code, and that is why GCC has an Objective C frontend. In other words, the whole process worked as the GPL intended. Ian
