🚀 go-pugleaf

This is an official announcement from the FSF.

The FSF worked with Cygnus to design terms of a joint project to
accomplish two goals:

* Raise money to pay for porting of GNU tools to Solaris.

* Raise money to give to the FSF.

Both of these will help the GNU project in one way or another, and both
of these are completely legitimate activities in the view of the FSF.

So I was surprised to see criticism of this offer from people who appear
to approve of the GNU project.

Much of the criticism is simply factually inaccurate, fundamentally
based on a misreading of the offer itself.  Even the numbers have
been quoted incorrectly by almost an order of magnitude.

To some extent the criticism seems to be based on disapproval of
profit.  Some people may think that any project which involves making
a profit is ipso facto wrong.  They are entitled to this opinion, but
please keep in mind that the GNU project does not object to making a
profit for service (which includes implementing additional free software).
I myself made a living for many years in this way while working on GNU.

The only unusual thing about this offer is that it attempts to find a
larger number of people (300) rather than a single customer, to support
a particular project.  This is an experiment, but if it succeeds, that
will be a very good thing.  It will be an additional way of raising
money to develop free software.

In any case, help-gcc is not an appropriate forum for criticizing the
offer.  We have a newsgroup specifically for discussions of whether
people agree with the FSF: gnu.misc.discuss.  If you want to have such
a discussion, please do it there.


Meanwhile, if you work at a place that uses Suns, I hope you will
seriously consider this offer as an alternative to licensing the Sun C
compiler.  Aside from the many advantages of free software, if you
have as many as three CPUs, this offer will simply be cheaper.