*BSD News Article 3786


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Restrictions on free UNIX / 386BSD (Re: selling 386BSD)
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!sdd.hp.com!think.com!unixland!rmkhome!rmk
From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Organization: The Man With Ten Cats
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 22:21:27 GMT
Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Message-ID: <9208171721.29@rmkhome.UUCP>
References: <PHR.92Aug15151100@soda.berkeley.edu> <63DILTJ@taronga.com> <PHR.92Aug15214245@soda.berkeley.edu> <YSDIBS4@taronga.com> <9208162341.30@rmkhome.UUCP> <PHR.92Aug17112028@soda.berkeley.edu>
Lines: 41

In article <PHR.92Aug17112028@soda.berkeley.edu> phr@soda.berkeley.edu (Paul Rubin) writes:
>    >... 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.

But some lawyers believe that the use of GCC to develop proprietary
applications that are shipped "binary only" may be hazardous to a
companies legal health.  The GPL has not been tested deeply in court.

I'm not a lawyer, and normally I don't worry about these things.

>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.

There is now going to be the choice of N incompatible freely-copyable
unixes, each with their own definition of UNIX.

It soon may be too late for a GNU OS, except for those who are interested
in using Mach in a distributed computing environment.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP