> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 4:18 AM > From: "Jeff Law via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> > To: "Richard Biener" <richard.guent...@gmail.com>, "Jonathan Wakely" > <jwakely....@gmail.com>, "Jonathan Wakely via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>, "Thomas > Koenig" <tkoe...@netcologne.de> > Subject: Re: GCC association with the FSF > > > On 4/14/2021 6:08 AM, Richard Biener via Gcc wrote: > > On April 14, 2021 12:19:16 PM GMT+02:00, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc > > <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote: > >> N.B. Jeff is no longer @redhat.com so I've changed the CC > >> > >> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 11:03, Thomas Koenig <tkoe...@netcologne.de> > >> wrote: > >>> - All gfortran developers move to the new branch. This will not > >>> happen, I can guarantee you that. > >> This is the part I'm curious about (the rest is obvious, it follows > > >from there being finite resources and the nature of any fork). But I'm > >> not going to press for reasons.
> > Note the only viable fork will be on the current hosting (which isn't FSF > > controlled) with the downside of eventually losing the gcc.gnu.org DNS and > > thus a need to "switch" to a sourceware.org name. It is likely that gcc.gnu.org would not be available. > I strongly suspect you're right here. Ultimately if one fork reaches > critical mass, then it survives and the other dies. That's a function > of the developer community. Right now I don't see the nightmare > scenario of both forks being viable playing out -- however I'm more > concerned now than I was before due Thomas's comments. > Given there would be actual work involved on the FSF side to keep a "fork" > with the exact same setup (and thus transparent with existing setups) I don't > see it keeping live (but I see somebody populating savannah with sources). > > Absolutely. I could even see a small community continuing to push the > FSF fork for a while until it becomes abundantly clear that only one > fork is long term viable. That's what happened with EGCS -- the > majority of the developer community went with the EGCS fork with a small > community staying on the FSF fork. Eventually it became clear that EGCS > had much broader developer support and the FSF fork ultimately withered > away. The issue would then be of compatibility. Free Software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, without violating copyright law. Gcc would continue as a Gnu Project nonetheless. Technically, gcc is not a fork. > Jeff > > >
