[rescue] Being jobless

[Shannon]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 11:48:16AM +0300, Meelis Roos wrote:

> This is just my personal opinion, but I think we would not have the GNU
> tools and compilers for such a broad variety of architectures if the
> licence would have not forbidden non-free forks. Companies would just
> have forked the codebase and created a proprietary toolchain that would
> have vanished toghether with the company.

We'll never know, will we?  :)

BSD UNIX and the toolset seems to have done very well without the GPL.
The compiler issue would have been solved too, had gcc not been around.
In the early days this was talked about, because back then gcc really
sucked.

I don't see any reason why a BSD compiler could not have worked out.

> So the "keep-it-free" licence has actually kept it alive and slowly
> getting forward (instead of a short but fast run and then stop).

Sure... just as it has killed quite a bit of software, for various
reasons both real and imagined.

-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon at widomaker.com