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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: The GNU Public License
Message-ID: <79700023@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 Aug 89 20:19:00 GMT
References: <210646@<1989Jul30>
Lines: 29
Nf-ID: #R:<1989Jul30:210646:p.cs.uiuc.edu:79700023:000:1118
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Aug  1 15:19:00 1989


Re: GNU Philosophy and Dogma

The first time someone gets sued by GNU for selling a program they
compiled with G++, or edited with GnuEmacs, or debugged with GDB, I
think you'll see 90% of all the GNU Software in the U.S. hit the
trashcan.  

Personally, I disagree with the GNU philosophy.  To summarize, the
philosophy is to build a bunch of taiwan-clone software with slightly
superior price/performance (i.e. zero price, and perhaps better
performance).  To accomplish this, some highly talented people are
spending years of their lives reimplementing some archaic (and rather
outdated) pieces of technology (emacs, c, sdb, unix, all pre-1980
developments), with a few embellishments of their own.

Now, 
(1) Can you say, "The existing software works o.k. in a standard way, 
    and is not unreasonably priced?"

(2) Can you say "It's a waste of time to reinvent the wheel?"

(3) Can you say, "UNIX isn't *everything*?"

I knew you could,

Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies