🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jan16.172305.8710@alphalpha.com> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
>In article <3313@airs.com> ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) writes:
>>commercial software.  Commercial software vendors can do whatever they
>>want, and they are not too likely to use the GPL; some do but most
>
>Who?  I keep asking this question and I keep getting lists of hardware
>and OS suppliers in reply.

I think this is a key point of this debate.  Chip vendors are interested
in selling chips (microprocessors, in this context).  Wide availability
of a compiler really helps their cause.  They make their money from selling
chips.. This applies to machine vendors (DG or Next, for example), as well.

Software vendors, on the other hand, have nothing but their software
to sell. Any sensible developer will take advantage of freely available
stuff to shorten the development time (and thus reduce the cost) of the
product they develop and supply.  FSF are unlikely to produce all the
software the world wants, and therefore have to accept that other
software developers, working to other rules, will be a part of the
scene.

I think a lot of the recent argument is that the 'free' in the FSF is
a misnomer as far as these developers are concerned.  As someone said
a few articles ago, the software is *not* free to a commercial developer
who wishes to supply some application not supplied under the GPL.

Perhaps if the GPL said that no part of software using FSF code could be
subject to patent or copyright restrictions, both sides would achieve
more.

Nick
-- 
Nick Felisiak 						nick@spider.co.uk
Spider Systems Limited					+44 31 554 9424