🚀 go-pugleaf

According to jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck):
>>People who contribute major new ports representing > 1 person-year of work
>>are often doing so because of the GPL (e.g. Motorola's gcc port to the
>>56000 DSP chip, Analog Devices' gcc-based work on DSP-C, Data General and
>>OSF's contributions to gcc ports, NeXT's work on Objective-C).

In article <2B4BC6DB.348E@tct.com> chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>Hm.  Have there been no similar contributions to X?

Yes, there have been substantial contributions to X as well from industry
that are freely available: Sun's xview stuff (well, the X part, not the
NeWS part), and several other extensions.  My point, though, was that
all the gcc extension projects I described above would have been
proprietary if it were not for the GPL, so Stallman has accomplished part
of his purpose by having it (using the GPL as leverage to create more
free software).

Now, I can hardly say that the GPL is right and X-style licensing is
wrong; after all, I'm one of the principal designers of Ptolemy (see
comp.dsp and comp.lsi.cad), which was released with a license adopted from
Ousterhout's Tcl/Tk, which is very similar to the terms for X (it took
some of us six months of lobbying to get Ptolemy declared free).  It's
just that there are advantages to either approach and I think you were
unfairly pretending that the GPL causes no additional sharing, when I
think I have pretty effectively demonstrated that this is not true.



--
Joe Buck	jbuck@ohm.berkeley.edu