>> I don't understand this. Why does the SC have little power in this >> matter? Surely you could decide to ship GCC 4.4 with the old license, >> as the official GCC maintainer? But you *choose* not to use this >> power (perhaps for good reasons, but I'm unconvinced). >> > The GCC maintainers work on behalf of the FSF and in some matters defer > to the FSF. It's that simple.
Yes, but it's not written anywhere that release and especially branching policies are one of this matters. Personally, what I'd like to see is a clear justification of why a license change motivated by plugins needs to be on a branch that will never have plugins. There has been already a plugin branch or two for a while, obviously with the old license, and the FSF said nothing. The only reason I can see, would be to avoid that merges *to* a plugin branch include new 4.5 features. Paolo
