GCC Development Mission Statement (1999-04-22)

GCC development is a part of the GNU Project, aiming to improve the compiler used in the GNU system including the GNU/Linux variant. The GCC development effort uses an open development environment and supports many other platforms in order to foster a world-class optimizing compiler, to attract a larger team of developers, to ensure that GCC and the GNU system work on multiple architectures and diverse environments, and to more thoroughly test and extend the features of GCC.

Free Software Project

• Supporting the goals of the GNU project, as defined by the FSF.
• Compilers are available under the terms of the GPL.
• Copyrights for the compilers are to be held by the FSF.
• Other components (runtime libraries, testsuites, etc) will be available under various free licenses with copyrights being held by individual authors or the FSF.
• All legal relationships with contributors and users are the responsibility of the FSF.
• Patches must be legally acceptable for inclusion into the GNU project.

Design and Development Goals

• New languages
• New optimizations
• New targets
• Improved runtime libraries
• Faster debug cycle
• Various other infrastructure improvements

Open Development Environment

• Encourage cooperation and communication between developers.
• Work more closely with "consumers".
• Code available to everyone at any time, and everyone is welcome to participate in development.
  • Patches will be considered equally based on their technical merits.
  • All individuals and companies are welcome to contribute as long as they accept the groundrules.
• Open mailing lists.
• Developer friendly tools and procedures (i.e., cvs, multiple maintainers, etc).
• Conflicts of interest exist for many GCC developers; the developers as well as the GCC Steering Committee will not allow those conflicts of interest to have an effect on the development of GCC.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

These pages are maintained by the GCC team.

For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the GCC manuals. If that fails, the gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org mailing list might help.
Please send comments on these web pages and the development of GCC to our developer mailing list at gcc@gnu.org or gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of our lists have public archives.

Copyright (C) Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Last modified 2006-06-21