I generally use the gcc as an example of where open source has hurt competition and hence innovation. That seems to be changing…
“One reference point I can give you is XMOS Ltd. (Bristol, England), a developer of event-driven, low latency multicore processors. XMOS has recently started to reposition the company as a high-end microcontroller company. There’s been no significant change in the hardware it sells as yet but the company recently reworked its entire line of development tools and moved them from GCC to LLVM.”
“The XMOS move reportedly produced improvements in compile time of about 40 percent, in run-time performance of about 60 percent, and reduced code size by 17 percent, over the previous GCC-based compiler.”
It also feeds into one point that I have said before. It’s only when a single entity, focuses on a specific technology can there be a winner. I use the Android and “what was its competitor consortium called?” as an example. The elephant in this room is apple.
But then I always had my reservations about gcc…
Samyeer Metrani 