🚀 go-pugleaf

tyrell@seaotter.micro.umn.edu (john drexler) writes:

>and marketing resources to take a hit from GNU. Who in their right mind, in 
>a volatile market like todays, is going to ENTER the UNIX market (where free
>software is rampant) and put money into creating OS or compilers?

The lack of commercial compilers for Unix in the old days had more to
do with the bundled (supported) C compiler, binary compatibility
hassles (e.g. DEC Mips boxes used to be incompatible with all other
Mips boxes) and low installed base.

Consider a success story: Sun.  Sun unbundled their C compiler.
It also helps that SPARC has an installed base of 0.8 million, with
good binary compatibility between all of them.

You say: in the presence of gcc nobody will want to write compilers for
SPARCs.  I say "in the absence of a bundled cc, given binary compatibility
across a large installed base, they will come".

In the event, I know of the following shipping compilers for SPARC:
Saber, Lucid, Apogee, Sunpro.  There exist a few others I can't recall.

These vendors are forced to do better in the presence of gcc+Cygnus.
E.g. Lucid and Saber are moving into GUI "development environments"
(not _my_ idea of a good way to develop software, but it gives users
more choices).  Apogee and Sunpro are working hard on producing better
code.  I think it's a very healthy state of affairs.

BTW Lucid and Emacs is a beautiful story of two-way interactions between
the worlds of free software and commercial software.  Someone care to
tell us the history of the project?

        -ans.
-- 
Ajay Shah, (213)749-8133, ajayshah@rcf.usc.edu