What an interesting and unproductive discussion but I hope it ends here or should I call somebody "a member of a German political party very popular around 1940"? :-)
Cheers, Manuel. On 02/03/07, Joe Buck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 11:10:22AM -0500, Richard Kenner wrote: > > And indeed, while this is a controversial statement with which > > some people will disagree, I believe that that split was caused in > > part by commercial interests on both sides of the split (and I was > > there at the time). > > Indeed I disagree. I'm not aware of any commercial interests on the FSF > GCC side. As far as I can recall, the split was between the commercial > interests on the EGCS side and the non-commercial interests on the FSF > side. It was not anywhere near that simple; there were a number of disputes that had nothing to do with commercial interests (particularly the very sorry state of C++). If your interpretation were correct, then after the split, the non-commercial idealists would have stayed with the FSF side of the split, but this didn't happen for the most part. You are right that there were concerns when it started that egcs would just be the Cygnus compiler, and one of the main purposes of the steering committee was precisely to prevent Cygnus from controlling it; the goal was to unify Cygnus "devo", pgcc, and f77, as well as have a portable compiler that worked on Linux: at the time, no FSF release would work on Linux, particularly for C++, you needed a bunch of horrible patches from HJ Lu. I could say much more (there are interesting stories about the behind-the-scenes politics) but it's off-topic.
