Re: J'accuse

jacob navia wrote:
*** T. Winter a écrit :

One additional point:

Everybody is able to get and use gcc for free, even if it is for
commercial and/or educational use. That is, the compiler is actually
free and comes with complete source. And nobody from the developers
will ever earn anything for their work.


Maybe.

I agree that some of them *do* earn from their work, if not directly from it.

When I implemented a JIT for linux, I asked one of the people that
wrote that code a question.

The answer was that I needed a yearly software maintenance contract
from redhat for US$ 20 000.

It happens. You could have kept asking around for others who are not in RedHat's pay. to help you.

This was significantly higher as Microsoft, that asks for US$ 2 000
for 3 questions in their MSDN contracts.

So?

Eventually, I solved it without asking questions. And no, the source
code of the compiler doesn't tell you anything.

How much it tells you depends on how good you are and how much time and effort you put in. I've only needed to fix binutils, not gcc, since the bugs I've found in gcc had already been fixed.

There isn't a single comment or technical description.

That is an exaggeration.

It is the generated code + hours in the debugger that led me to
the solution.

No, I am not telling you that what that developer did was wrong,
since they have to live from their work as I do.

As both of you are allowed to.

What I am telling
you is that it is the same thing I do.

No, what you do is different. You charge two groups of people for licenses for you compiler, and without those licenses they are not permitted to use it. The gcc developers don't charge for licenses but at least *some* of them charge (or get a company to charge for them) for support.

There is nothing wrong with either model, but they are different.

When you mention Redhat, Suse and others: what they provide (and what
is not so easy to obtain, but can be done), is a complete operating
system.

They did not paid for the development of that system. The biggest part
was done by unpaid programmers.

Actually they *do* pay programmers to do work developing it. So do IBM and other companies.

They provide you with it, complete, and they ask money for
that. However, if you are willing to obtain the individual parts and
glue them together, you can do so for free, which I have done for early
versions of gcc and other gnu-tools.


Sure, but it will cost you so much work that nobody will do it.

Wrong. Look at CentOS (which is free and identical to RedHat Enterprise Server apart from the branding and trade marked material). Also, I believe, you should look at WhiteBox Linux.

Their reasoning is sound. That is why there are no comments in
GNU source code in the majority of applications.

That is *definitely* an exaggeration. I know because I had to do a fix for binutils. The fix was done on my companies time (and therefor paid for by my employer) and submitted back for free. Admittedly when they say my fix they decided to do something slightly different, but I did not charge them for my fix and they did not charge me for theirs. I also did not hve to pay for binutils (or gcc or lots of other things) even though I am using them for commercial purposes (and often charging for installing free version of Linux).

No comments,

Wrong.

no
description,

Wrong.

and it will change in a whim.

All software changes at the whims of those controlling it. Including *your* compiler which changes at *your* whim.

Why?

Think for a moment.

Not for the reasons you think.

My institute elected to supply some 200 of the about 250 computers
present with variants of Linux, all from bundled versions, like Fedora,
Debian, Suse and some others. (The remainder, mostly not used in
research have some version of Windows installed.)

Your institue paid for commercial use then. Why is so bad that I do the
same?

Well, neither me nor my company paid for the company of Centos 5.3 which I use almost daily for commercial purposes and which is identical to Red Hat ES 5.3 (apart from branding). Nor did we pay for the copies I've installed for severl companies, including large international companies (we are a *small* international company). We did charge them for my time doing the installation and configuration, but we charge the same daily rate for installing & configuring commercial versions, Windows, MS SQL Server, Oracle (on one occasions), our software and anything else we install (we used to charge for installing SCO, but we don't do SCO any more).

So a lot of people (including large international companies) use Linux and other free software for free, some pay for services (such as installation and support) and some pay for similar services for software they have paid for (not necessarily paying the company that sells the software).

Oh, and we also use SW (embedded in the software we sell) where the license specifies you have to let the author know you are using it and what for, and I duly notified the author and we paid nothing. I even noted this in our documentation.
--
Flash Gordon
.

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