On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 01:04:15PM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > By the way, from reading this messages I think that people have a > slightly rosier recollection of the egcs split than I do. I think the > egcs split was the right thing to do, but it was also a power play on > the part of Cygnus because we could not continue operating under the > existing gcc maintainership regime, and we could not get the FSF to > change it. We signed up most of the non-Cygnus contributors because we > needed political cover; we were able to sign them up because they were > facing the same problems that we were.
Well, yes; egcs started with a proposal from inside Cygnus, and it started from Cygnus's "devo tree". But those people were wise enough to avoid a simple Cygnus takeover. Instead they chose people outside Cygnus to set up a structure that provided some independence, and to create an effort that would merge a bunch of code that wasn't in the FSF sources: the Pentium gcc fork, HJ Lu's Linux patches, g77 as well as what Cygnus was working on.
