Heads up, g++ in Xcode 5 points to Clang

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 28/10/13 18:33, Joakim wrote:
> Do you have any evidence that they've exerted "proprietary control" over llvm,
> say by adding closed modules to their compiler?

I understand how you could interpret it that way, but my email didn't actually 
suggest that Apple had any plans to close-source the compiler.

My impression -- and I'm happy to be proven wrong -- is that Apple disliked the 
idea of a GPLv3-licensed compiler because its patent grants might have created 
problems for other parts of their software portfolio, which indeed _are_ 
proprietary.

> While I do not buy Apple products because of their odious patent stance, I
> highly doubt they would ever use such compiler patents, if they even have any.
> Microsoft has a patent on continually scanning a document for spelling errors
> and highlighting them (http://www.google.com/patents/US5787451), yet _as far as
> we know_ (and according to a former Microsoft employee -
> http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=1548), they've never asserted it on the
> dozens of applications with such spell-checking in their text editing controls,
> including this Chrome browser tab I'm currently typing into.

I think we've all seen enough software history to know that "highly unlikely" is 
not the same as "won't happen". :-)

> I agree that it is a problem that Apple doesn't do a patent grant for their open
> source projects, assuming they even have any compiler or other software patents
> on them, but I'm skeptical they'd ever enforce those anyway.  Also, IANAL, but I
> believe they'd never be able to extract any money from such a lawsuit anyway,
> since they don't make any money from clang or Safari and give them away for free.

I doubt they'd try to use their patents to extract money from anyone, but I 
could see them using them to put a competitor out of business.  If (say) Firefox 
OS or Ubuntu Touch become significant forces in the mobile/tablet market, I 
wouldn't put it past any of the traditional mobile players to pull out their 
patent portfolios to try and damage them.