🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <HAGERMAN.90Oct13205442@rx7.ece.cmu.edu> hagerman@ece.cmu.edu (John Hagerman) writes:
>How many software companies use the standard libraries that come with
>a commercial compiler?  Shouldn't these companies pay royalties to the
>developers of those libraries?  Or are those royalties included in the
>price of the compiler (so that those of us who use the compiler, but
>not for product development, are helping out the software companies)?
>
>- John
>--
>hagerman@ece.cmu.edu


It has been many many years since compiler writers charged for every
program you ran which had been compiled with their compiler.  People
would laugh at the idea nowadaya.  Or so I thought, until I recently
bought a DOS extender so that I could compile 'ordinary' programs
on those brain-dead beasties.  After buying the damned thing we got
more mail asking for money for a 'binder' which linked the dos extensions
into an exe file -- what we had bought would only let us run programs
on one machine.  And the royalties were several hundred dollars.

Needless to say, the DOS extender is in the trash can now and we've
'bought a real computer, sonny' to do the job the original fuss had
been about.  Interestingly enough, the new machine is 5 times faster
than the DOS machine and half the price.  Now, *who* was doing the
port of GCC to Acorn's Risc OS? We're still waiting, buddy! :-)

Graham
(And sorry, I know it wasn't really relevant to the question)
-- 
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