Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 12:09:50 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: More FUD from Perens Message-ID: <20010615120950.G61673@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <NCBBLIEPOCNJOAEKBEAKCEDKPOAA.davids@webmaster.com>; from davids@webmaster.com on Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 03:01:10AM -0700 References: <20010615113415.C61673@lpt.ens.fr> <NCBBLIEPOCNJOAEKBEAKCEDKPOAA.davids@webmaster.com>
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David Schwartz said on Jun 15, 2001 at 03:01:10: > > I've read that the C99 standard is well on its way to being fully > > implemented in gcc, while people like Microsoft have no plan of > > implementing it at all. > > Let's look at this. Consider a universe in which gcc wasn't GPLed. > Microsoft's compiler might have been based on it. Microsoft might have even > tracked gcc's development with newer versions of its compiler. This might > have made it very inexpensive for Microsoft to implement the C99 standard. > > Equally importantly, it makes it hard for Microsoft to make significant > proprietary changes. Every change makes it harder for them to continue to > track the development. But, of course, this choice was never open to them, > so we'll never know whether they would have chosen it. > > It's possible the GPL is directly responsible for Microsoft's failure to > adopt C99. We'll never know. OK, so now the GPL is to blame for Microsoft not being C99-compliant? If Microsoft had been able to adopt GCC, they'd have done so *and made it incompatible*. That's their entire history, and they're not the only ones. Sendmail's existence didn't prevent Microsoft from sabotaging SMTP. And of course there's the Kerberos example. The drive to break standards comes not from an inability to implement them, but from a desire to lock in customers. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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