Richard Guenther <rguent...@suse.de> writes: >> But anyway, is the official position of the FSF still "thou shall use >> not C++"? That would mean GNU binutils is in violation with gold, no? > > Probably people were clever enough not to ask the FSF about this ;)
Correct: I certainly did not ask the FSF about gold, and I very much doubt that any of the other binutils maintainers did either. While agreeing that the FSF is the legal owner of the code, I personally consider the implementation language to be a technical detail which the FSF has no special control over. We can consider their input, but we need not follow it. This is distinct from licensing issues, where we had to either move to GPLv3 or fork into an independent project. By the way, from reading this messages I think that people have a slightly rosier recollection of the egcs split than I do. I think the egcs split was the right thing to do, but it was also a power play on the part of Cygnus because we could not continue operating under the existing gcc maintainership regime, and we could not get the FSF to change it. We signed up most of the non-Cygnus contributors because we needed political cover; we were able to sign them up because they were facing the same problems that we were. Ian
