Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 23:00:11 +0100 From: des@des.no (Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?=) To: Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos <miguel@anjos.strangled.net> Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSD Mall : to hell Message-ID: <868xs0o1sk.fsf@xps.des.no> In-Reply-To: <200602242054.k1OKsP3B006095@compaq.anjos.strangled.net> (Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos's message of "Fri, 24 Feb 2006 20:54:25 GMT") References: <200602242054.k1OKsP3B006095@compaq.anjos.strangled.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos <miguel@anjos.strangled.net> writes: > Let's take gcc for example, how much of RedHat's money goes to gcc? > Well, gcc was there long before RedHat existed, and it has evolved > to meet RedHat's clients needs long ago (why should the quality of > the compiler matter to RedHat back when Microsoft's compiler was > very bad comparatively?), so I don't think gcc receives a lot > because of a), and because of b) I suspect it receives only a quota > of a global amount given to FSF. I'm really convinced that gcc owes > very little of its existance to RedHat or similar fundings. But I'm > just guessing, perhaps RedHat is more into Philanthropy. Yes, GCC is an excellent example. It had gotten completely bogged down in FSF politics and was going nowhere fast when Cygnus Solutions (one of the first companies to try to make money on Open Source) forked EGCS. In a short time, they made great improvements to the optimizer, brought the C++ frontend (which the FSF had neglected for years) up-to-date, and added a Java frontend. The FSF finally gave in, and EGCS became the official version of GCC. Cygnus has since been absorbed by RedHat, which continues to fund the development of GCC. RedHat has also made and continues to make many other contributions to Linux and GNU, such as LVM and the device mapper (their equivalent to GEOM), or GFS, originally a closed-source product, which was open- sourced when RedHat acquired Sistina. The PAM implementation used in most Linux distributions, Linux-PAM, was developed entirely within RedHat. I'm sure there are dozens or hundreds of other examples. More recently, both SuSE (now owned by Novell) and RedHat have invested a lot of effort into improving X, with compositing, 3D desktops, much improved hardware acceleration, etc. All of this work benefits not only Linux, but also BSD. I suppose the conclusion we can draw from this is that you were arguing out of ignorance... DES --=20 Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav - des@des.no
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?868xs0o1sk.fsf>