That's true, but how much can that bloat amount to? 20 MB? 100 MB? It won't be much relevant for today's standards. Code duplication is what happens regularly in the closed source world, where applications ship with a private version of all the libraries they use, and not only for the UI - with few people complaining.

https://mail.gnome.org/archive... - don't know if things have changed in the last two years.

GTK+ 3 is LGPLv2, not GPLv3; it is not developed by the FSF, and never has been. And the GPLv3 is arguably more friendly for businesses than the GPLv2, with its explicit patent provisions, the lack of the termination provision, and the explicit system libraries exception.

Because GTK2 is bit-rotting and GTK3 is bound to GNOME.

By saying that, do "the Free Software Community" mean making Linux accessible to many users that wouldn't have dreamt of using it before? Being the first ones to provide a distribution that you can actually recommend to a computer illiterate?

And then again, why should anyone have a say on what toolkit Google decide to use for their own browser? Did "the Free Software Community" have anything to say when it was slang vs ncurses, emacs vs vim, gtk vs qt, gnome vs kde? No, because exploring alternate solutions is good for the whole community in the long run. Please stop this poisonous attitude of finding "enemies of the people" among people who dare write free software.

http://www.google.com/dashboar... draws a much more accurate depiction of every espect of my life, and it's just one piece of paper away from the government. Today the stasi espions would be unemployed.

They got the subsidized fuel price, by mistake, even for private flights unrelated to NASA.

In fact, arguably it's not NASA that got ripped. It's the federal government that lost money, between $3.3 million and $5.3 million according to TFA, in taxes that would be collected from that fuel, had Google execs bought it like everyone else does.

Basically what is happening here is poor people paying to let the richest people on Earth fly they own private jets. But the company that is benefiting from that is only in personal union with Google, so "don't be evil" doesn't apply here. IANAL.

...with its obsession for spying every personal detail of every individual of the world with every possible means and gathering the collected data into their archives forever. The only difference between Google glass and all the other products of Google is that glass makes the espionage physically evident.

The EU is losing the support of the masses even in the most euro-enthusiastic countries. As an institution in its whole, people feel that the EU is inexorable when it's time to demand new taxes, dismantle the welfare state, or regulate the length of cucumbers, but then is completely unhelpful, and sometimes harmful, when it's time to solve the problems of the citizens (migration, transportation, environment, defense, foreign policy...) instead of the problems of the banks. Each member state pursues exclusively its own interest with no vision watsoever of the long-term good of the whole continent.

As an EU supporter, I'm afraid that at the next european elections we'll see a triumph of every kind of populism / demagogy / nationalism, left-wing and right-wing, and the people who get elected will work exclusively to suppress the EU from the inside. And I have few arguments against them left. The EU can't carry on by having only the support of the "elite" who can understand the advantages of the common market. They need to conquer back the trust of regular people, or they will disappear.

In ladder, even basic logic structures such as a finite-state machine are hard to express, and harder to read. I still have to understand the reason for the success of ladder. It's hard to write, it's hard to read, it's hard to maintain, even the program "text" is impractical to handle (think about cut and paste).

Has Google Docs been open sourced now? Can it be hosted on a private server, so that the UK government needn't share every single document of them - and therefore their citizen's most private data - with the NSA?

even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally.

To make an example, once Microsoft broke a Word (2000 IIRC) VBA application of mine because a service pack, not even a version upgrade, changed the indexing of tables' elements from being zero-based to being one-based. I was shocked to see that they care so little about compatibility.

Clang error output includes full static analysis,

The compiler is one thing, the static analyzer is another. The error messages of the two compilers are comparable. I've already admitted that GCC is not as suitable for tooling as LLVM is.

"Hip" seems to be your biased way to say modern.

Of course every judgement of value I make is biased, it reflects my opinion. I do my best to avoid objectively false statements, and I like to be corrected when that happens.

And no, small differences in executable speed is not the primary concern of most compiler users.

See that everybody's biased? You say "small difference", others could use different terms when the objective data is "up to 39%". As for the fact that compiler users don't care about speed, you should ask the end users of the binaries about that, rather than the users of the compiler itself. Personally, if ease of development was my primary concern, I'd code everything in Java. GCC even supports it ;-) .

Not so much. This very story is about ESR questioning why GPL GCC deliberately prevents non-GPL software from linking with it. Thus handicapping GCC for developers of IDEs and other tools. And the answer from RMS, that he refuses to compromise, and thus GCCs restrictions remain.

This very story is about ESR not being aware that GCC does have a plugin system and a license exception allowing it to link with GPL-compatible software (such as BSD) for that purpose. The reasons why this interface does not find much use is technical, not political: GCC internals are (1) not modular and (2) do not expose stable programming interfaces. These facts would not change even if GCC was relicensed overnight to the BSD license or the WTF license.

Error messages are only slightly better in clang, because GCC has improved since version 4.2, and now even clang developers themselves explain that clang is better in caret positioning and colouring, which I wouldn't call being a generation ahead. See what the GCC wiki says about that.

Clang is slightly faster than GCC, when compiling at the same optimization level.

Clang is written in C++ and modular, and as result of this, it is more embeddable in third party projects and it can target multiple platforms with a single executable. Work is being done in GCC to address this but I'm talking about released code here.

But when we consider less "hip" features, GCC makes faster code (which is usually the foremost interest of a compiler's user). And GCC supports more target platforms. And GCC supports more language features (FORTRAN, OpenMP, VLAIS).

A GCC developer's benchmark about GCC's vs clang's speed of compilation and of the resulting code.

Currently, GCC is superior than LLVM, not the other way around. Also, it was ESR who appeared into GCC's technical mailing list making political lectures, not RMS.