Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.linux:35378 comp.os.386bsd.questions:1835 gnu.misc.discuss:8709 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!forney.berkeley.edu!jbuck From: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.questions,gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: GNUified Linux vs FREE 386BSD Date: 21 Apr 1993 23:09:35 GMT Organization: U. C. Berkeley Lines: 43 Distribution: world Message-ID: <1r4k7f$grd@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <1993Apr15.225354.18654@samba.oit.unc.edu> <C5sLq7.5LI@stroberg.uucp> <1r4cvmINNlr9@no-names.nerdc.ufl.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: forney.berkeley.edu In article <1r4cvmINNlr9@no-names.nerdc.ufl.edu> kem@zoyd.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Kelly Murray) writes: >In response to your point, few people will release their sources just >because GNU `forces' them. If someone does not want to give away their >work, they simply do not have the option to build upon GNU software. >Thus, GNU software does not directly contribute to creating better >commercial software, whereas really-free software does. >I think the general reaction of GNUites is that this is a good thing. >They don't acknowledge the benefits of proprietary, commercial software. Sorry, but there is a simple counterargument to what you say here, namely, everything ever produced by NeXT. Every bit of their software is compiled by a compiler derived from gcc. Are you seriously going to claim that they would have achieved what they did if they didn't have GCC to start from, so they would have had to produce an Objective-C compiler, debugger, and other developent tools from scratch? Many commercial software developers and commercial companies benefit from GNU software -- everyone who uses any of the GNU tools benefits. In some cases, they wind up (like Lucid's Energize environment, or Motorola's 56000 development tools) producing a package that combines free (GPL) software, proprietary software, and support, thus getting a product to market faster (why write a fancy editor if you can just use Emacs and customize it as you like)? You might argue that in the absense of the GPL, GCC might be "completely free" and NeXT could have built on that. If GCC were not licensed under the GPL, then some software companies would have used it as a basis for their own compilers, but they would not have given back the changes -- it is these changes that have made GCC as portable and as high-quality as it is. I think that at least in the case of GCC, it is the GPL that has created the huge number of freely available ports: 15 or so different instruction sets and 50+ different platforms, if not more. Without the GPL, there'd be some gcc-derived compilers here and there, but work on one would not assist work on the others. Does that mean I think that all code should be licensed under the GPL? No. But to deny its contribution is to just put your head in the sand. -- Joe Buck jbuck@ohm.berkeley.edu