Considering that every unit sold of the most popular consumer smartphone/tablet OS is built with a GPLv3 toolchain, I think you need to talk to your lawyers.
Like I said, this argument is dumb. The fact that Very Important People With Decision Power are making dumb decisions doesn't make it less dumb. FreeBSD isn't really doing this to support their business customers (again, things like Android are existence proofs to the contrary), they're doing it to stick it to the FSF (c.f. some of the comments in this very thread. That's dumb.
(Which is not to argue that clang is a bad choice -- it isn't!)
> FreeBSD isn't really doing this to support their business customers
This is precisly why FreeBSD chose this route. It was a deliberate communicated decision years ago from the FreeBSD Foundation. I wonder if you have ever heard this quote:
> I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
> Considering that every unit sold of the most popular consumer smartphone/tablet OS is built with a GPLv3 toolchain, I think you need to talk to your lawyers.
However, note that it doesn't _bundle_ it. And Google has gone to some lengths to produce their own non-[L]GPL libc (Bionic). As far as I know, the Android userland is pretty much a no-GPL zone these days.
Can we assume that this is because smartphone manufacturers do not want to allow customers to install modified version of the compiler on devices that the customers has bought?
We can discuss if one should be allowed to modify ones own property, but lets at least be clear if that is the discussion we have.
Er, no, it's just because there's no reason to ship a compiler. However, if they were shipping a compiler, I suspect it would not be a GPLv3 GCC; Google have pretty systematically purged GPL from the Android userspace, and I don't think it has any GPLv3.
Finally a compiler comes along that shares the same license philosophy and can be imported wholesale WITHOUT having to worry about licensing issues due to changes that may need o be made.
If clang/llvm hadn't come along FreeBSD would have upgraded to a later version of GCC.
Like I said, this argument is dumb. The fact that Very Important People With Decision Power are making dumb decisions doesn't make it less dumb. FreeBSD isn't really doing this to support their business customers (again, things like Android are existence proofs to the contrary), they're doing it to stick it to the FSF (c.f. some of the comments in this very thread. That's dumb.
(Which is not to argue that clang is a bad choice -- it isn't!)