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From: phr@soda.berkeley.edu (Paul Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Restrictions on free UNIX / 386BSD (Re: selling 386BSD)
Date: 17 Aug 92 11:20:28
Organization: CSUA/UCB
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Message-ID: <PHR.92Aug17112028@soda.berkeley.edu>
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In-reply-to: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP's message of 17 Aug 92 04:41:28 GMT
>... Next, Sun (In Solaris 2), and I believe MIPS ship GCC with
>their products, in some cases as the primary compilers. This
>sort of distribution is not practical for an operating system.
And from reading comp.unix.solaris, I get the idea that a number
of development shops will buy compilers for Solaris 2.0 because of
the GNU Copyleft.
The copyleft does not prevent development shops from using GCC.
If they think it does, they haven't been paying attention, or they are
letting their decisions be controlled by paranoid knee-jerk reactions
instead of by intelligence. I'm sure this makes Sun happy; there's
one born every minute, as the saying goes. I don't see this as a
reason to let Sun and others make proprietary GCC's. I can't see
any benefit of a non-copyleft GCC that could outweigh sacrificing
the hundreds of improvements, ports, etc. that people have been
allowed to contribute because the marketroids they work for weren't
permitted to grab the improvements for themselves.
We saw the same situation with Unix, but it didn't work out so well.
Dozens of companies made proprietary improvements and fixes, so you
had your choice of N incompatible Unixes, each with a different subset
of the original bugs fixed. One of the hopes of the GNU OS and its
copyleft is to prevent this from happening again.