alt Hacker NewsNot necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.
"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.
The vulnerability in the thinking is that if GNU can't reliably get crystals started, if the seeds that make it are dependent on some external force like Cygnus or Linux, and dominant GCC can become has-been GCC, maybe we're looking at an afterglow of some luck and experiment that has a very bleak future if left alone.
Maybe people realized the FSF model isn't sustainable, and a model dependent on mass-volunteerism and religious viral spread of cooperative behaviors falls off when the days become months and the months become years. What if the greys are not being replaced by the dabbers. If that's the case, there won't be another bang.
Maybe see what I'm up to with https://prizeforge.com. I'm hoping to get the MVP functioning with semi-decency today. Mac does not agree with the WASM and I have at least one small dirty hack to execute before I can go live.