He might not because he thinks that it wouldn't work and could backfire. But I'd be willing to bet that he would like to do this.

Today if you build an application that people interact with on a website, you don't have to share source under the GPL. And companies build plenty of applications and don't share source. If you build an application that you distribute to people the GPL can make you share source. And companies build plenty of applications and share source because of it.

RMS thinks that the latter is a good thing. I'd be willing to bet that he thinks that the former is a bad thing. Given a future where more and more applications are hosted elsewhere, this constantly reduces the impact of the GPL.

The public performance idea does nothing more than put people whose application runs on a website in the same boat as people whose application runs on your computer. The complaints that people would have parallel the complaints that traditional software companies have about the GPL. The benefits from the point of view of the FSF are exactly the same.

Why do you think that RMS would be morally opposed to evening the playing field in this way?

Cheers,
Ben

It was used against the GPL back when the GPL first came out. RMS wasn't convinced by it then, why would he be convinced by it now?

Besides you're way overestimating the impact. Take a GPLed tool like emacs. If you write code with emacs, the code that you've written is yours and you can do with it what you want. Likewise if you write a website with emacs, by no stretch of the imagination can that website be viewed as a public performance of emacs. Therefore you'd be unaffected by the change.

However if you were using, say, a GPLed library for dealing with XMLhttpd requests, then the public website which is delivering data to clients using that library might be considered a public performance of that library. (This is assuming that a court rules that this is public performance, which is a question that no court as yet has considered.) And then you might have extra clauses to consider.

Cheers,
Ben

The GPL says:

The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

It is very easy for the output of a compiler to be a work based on the compiler under copyright law. For a trivial example, it could just insert a copyrighted poem into the final work. For a more realistic example, suppose that it inserted a section of code that tested the type of CPU and dynamically turned on/off specific optimizations or workarounds.

The result is that there are specific kinds of optimizations that the GCC maintainers will not even consider because they would make the output of GCC a derivative work of GCC and trigger the GPL.

Personally I wish that they added them anyways and had a compiler switch that you could use to turn them on. On my Debian system, I don't mind if all of the GPLed utilities are compiled in a way that makes them faster but derivative works of GCC.

Cheers,
Ben