Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

A pessimist is one who knows it.

Copyleft has shown itself to be an effective and robust tool against software freedom either getting eroded or evaporated. Since it has to balance conflicting goals, one has to adapt this tool as the world changes and reevaluate the compromises taken and their respective drawbacks.

That involved both the license itself as well as how to make sure that its coverage of "the work as a whole" manages to actually affect what it is designed to be good for. That will always remain an issue, even though the current facts are, uh, not quite the state that Eric Raymond assumed to be working with.