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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