🚀 go-pugleaf

John's arguements and presentation of gcc as proof by example are
well-formed.  But I do not find them convincing in reference to other
classes of software.

In particular, I believe there are counter-examples in freely available
software.  Consider ingres.  Started at UCB, it eventually foundered as
a freely available item and was eclipsed in popularity by the
proprietary version.

Another interesting example is `elm'.  Written by Dave Taylor, it
passed into the hands of a volunteer group.  These volunteers have
"ownership" of elm as a whole, and their releases are treated as
definitive.  But elm has not obtained commercial support and packaging.
A commercial version is available from Hewlett-Packard but only for
their machines and without source.

Consider sc.  It's a spreadsheet, one of the two applications (the other
was word processing) that kicked the PC into high gear.  Change is
glacial, and these days it looks pretty primitive.  It just doesn't
seem to be making it as a product.

There are of course some critical differences between what happened
with ingres and things under the GPL.  First, the development staff for
university ingres had no interest in or charter to make it work
anywhere outside of their own environment.  Second, it was not possible
to purchase support or in any other wise get the advantages John
describes for distributed co-ordinated support.  UCB wasn't interested
in providing that support, FSF hadn't started, and Cygnus was two or
three generations away.  Third, non-UCB developers were not required to
return their source to the public.

Johns proof by example doesn't exactly fail, but there are a number of
counter-examples as well.

Another point to remember with gcc is gnulib.a (gcc-gnulib).  Special
provision was made to let its code be linked into applications without
requiring the application fall under GPL.  One could make a case that
without that provision, gcc would have have successfully entered the
commercial arena with Motorola, etc.
-- 
   ``Who likes music that's repetitious?  Sensitive New Age Guys.
   Who likes music that's repetitious?  Sensitive New Age Guys.''
        "Sensitive New Age Guys", Christine Lavin