🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Oct23.082748.24704@paris.ics.uci.edu> schmidt@glacier.ics.uci.edu (Doug Schmidt) writes:
> My point here is that many people are who think they *can't* use various
> GNU tools for fear of copyleft infringement are just choosing not to
> understand the issues.  

I, too, have a hard time understanding all the fuss.  FSF code is great!
It's there, it does useful things, I can get it, I can hack it, and
I can give it to my friends.

All the FSF asks is that I distribute source with my hacks.  No complaints;
it's not all that onerous, and I can tell people to go fix it themselves
if they have a problem I don't want to work on for some reason.

There's a lot of legalese to add recursion to the thing (maybe I should
compare the GPL to the Y combinator?), but that's basically all there
is to the General Public Licence: If you distribute your hacks, distribute
source with changes noted.

GCC seems to be achieving significant "commercial" success.  NeXT and
Data General are shipping derivatives as "the" compiler, and Intel and
others distribute their versions.  I think this is because the energy
required to write a compiler or port another is sufficient to make people
hesitate and see that the GPL isn't terribly arduous.  With other utilities,
there are lots of commercial alternatives the timid but rich can stick
with out of fear this legal obligation to distribute source will somehow
bite them worse than an obligation not to.  I neglect to set read perms
on my FSF-derived source?  Oops.  I'll fix that in future.  I neglect
to remove read perms from AT&T source?  Oops.  An army of suits just
showed up at my front door quoting numbers of 7 digits and up.

Anyway, hopefully the experience with GCC will assuage people's fears
and they'll start using other FSF products for simpler reasons like
"they're faster."
-- 
	-Colin