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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!think.com!unixland!rmkhome!rmk From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Restrictions on free UNIX / 386BSD (Re: selling 386BSD) Message-ID: <9208251653.26@rmkhome.UUCP> Date: 25 Aug 92 21:53:22 GMT References: <PHR.92Aug15214245@soda.berkeley.edu> <YSDIBS4@taronga.com> <9208162341.30@rmkhome.UUCP> <1992Aug17.225116.20533@panix.com> <9208181753.32@rmkhome.UUCP> <1992Aug25.062100.15187@nntp.hut.fi> Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) Organization: The Man With Ten Cats Lines: 47 In article <1992Aug25.062100.15187@nntp.hut.fi> jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) writes: >>Software houses such as Lotus and Wordperfect want complete assurance that >>their product is secure under the law when it goes out the door. There is >>no court record to show what happens when the buyer of a commercial software >>product demands source from the author because it was compiled using GCC, >>and should fall under the GNU Copyleft. > >Hmm - I think I've heard that Commodore(-Amiga) uses gcc to compile >their **ix OS and Lotus (yep, of the 1-2-3 and lawsuit fame) uses gcc >to compile their products. And then there's DG which ships gcc as the >native compiler. It would be a strange to build SVR4 with gcc. Commodore probably started out with a Motorola development system running SVR4, and a big pile of sources. They would have then hacked and cross-compiled a development environment that would run on the Amiga 2500 and 3000. I am one of those evil people who has been tainted by exposure to SVR4 sources, and I can tell you that they are very interesting. There is C++ code in SVR4. Since cfront is not included as part of the binary release, they have included in the sources a subset of cfront to compile the small amount of included C++ code. After the C++ modules are compiled, the minimal cfront is deleted. There are lots of other "cute" things like this in the SVR4 source release. So while it could probably be built with gcc, there would probably be an enormous amount of makefile hacking before it could be done. As far as I know, Commodore includes the AT&T /bin/cc as well as gcc. I'm not sure about Lotus, but I have a friend who is a programmer there, and I will check with them. And I have no idea about DG. If one wants to compile Mach, gcc would probably be the compiler of choice, as I suspect that is what CMU uses for development. After looking at the standard GPL and the GPL for the GNU libc.a, I can see that there really aren't any problems with using gcc to compile copyrighted code. But I would still be somewhat leery about developing code on a system that relies on the GNU libc.a, as it's license is more restrictive. -- Rick Kelly rmk@rmkhome.UUCP unixland!rmkhome!rmk rmk@frog.UUCP