Gabriel Ravier via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> writes: >> What is this man? Are you trying to compute the probability of survival >> a project? You forgot to count me. I am one of the users of GCC. If >> there are no users then the project is dead; however heavyweight the >> maintainers are. >> >> And let me also tell you the truth. I have looked at the list of >> maintainers and the steering committee for the first time, when this >> thread was started. My reason for sticking to GCC is FSF and associated >> cause. Not the above list of people. Those who are not connected with >> the cause have already started migrating to the competing tools. >> > While I am not saying that the amount of maintainers is directly tied > to the survival of a project, I would certainly say that a project > with near to no maintainers without which it cannot compete with > competing projects (for example, Clang) /will/ die off.
I have never said that the project will survive without maintainers. I just asked you to count me as well. Success of the project also depends on how widely it is used. And you need to look at the reasons why people are using it. > The only ones that would remain would be those that would use GCC > despite its enormous shortcomings for the single and only reason that > it is licensed under the GPL, and those would be rather rare compared > to the amount of people that use GCC right now. I am not saying that > they are just a few dozen people or something like that, but GCC would > become a shadow of its former self without any other support. People who care for “Copyleft” were already rare. But people joined; despite the shortcomings people used “Libre” tools. Something must have triggered them to participate as users, as developers. What could be that? > I would say that under those circumstances GCC would become about as > popular as Turbo C or other antiquated tools like it, and I would > certainly hope one would consider Turbo C to be a dead compiler, > despite the fact that it still has at least 1 active user. > While I don't think this outcome is likely, it would become likely if > every single corporation and organization involved in the development > of GCC suddenly retracted support for it. Do you really think GCC > could remain competitive compared to compilers like Clang or MSVC if > development on it was 5 times as slow, and if distributions like > Fedora and Ubuntu started to migrate to LLVM, or even maybe straight > up removed GCC from their repositories ? > PS: Of course, this is completely implausible, and it is almost > certain that this will never happen, but you're implying that GCC can > perfectly survive without any support from corporations: I am simply > telling you what would happen if all those corporations actually > stopped to support it I never said that corporations are not important. But it is not charity. It is the benefit that they got out of GCC. After LLVM, this will also be a big challenge. Let us watch the funding trends in the coming years. I will emphasize on getting those people onboard who are associated with the cause. And when I say this, I talk about both sides of the spectrum - the developers as well as the users. With the right set of emotionally connected community of people, you can do wonders. Anyway, I am not against your view that maintainers are important. They certainly are.
