On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 12:17:07PM +0100, devuan.kn@??? wrote:
>
> GCC was deliberately making things interdepend on each other, even
> without technical reasons, simply to prevent commercial entities to
> replace the e.g. front-end of the compiler with some proprietary code
> and then have that use the GPL backend. This would enable a new,
> proprietary language to leverage all the optimizations gcc has.

This happened, except for the proprietry part, with Modula 3.
The currently most common Modula 3 compiler has been fitted with a
back end generating intermediate code acceptable to a modified gcc
back end.

The modifications to the back end consist mainly of code that reads
in intermediate code from a file instead of getting it passed in
from previous passes in memmory.

Modula 3 is released under the SRC public license, which is somewhat
more free than the GPL. But it has been declared incompatible with
the GPL by the FSF, so Modula 3 compilation always has to go though
this efficency-destroying inrermediate file.

Modula 3 is no longer of any interest to the SRC (or its legal
successors) so there's no hope of getting them to change the license.

>...
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/ covers the most recent flare-up when
> somebody wanted to make the AST of GCC accessible.

There's a good quote in the comments to this article:

"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus
and running code".

-- hendrik