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From: eric@egsner.cirr.com (Eric Schnoebelen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl,comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Why perl can't ship as HP/Apollo base software
Message-ID: <1990Jul14.193357.9965@egsner.cirr.com>
Date: 14 Jul 90 19:33:57 GMT
References: <4b8c2cb1.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Organization: Central Iowa (Model) Railroad, Dallas, Tx.
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In article <4b8c2cb1.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> carlton@apollo.hp.com
					 (Carlton B. Hommel) writes:
- 
- I've spent several hours over the past few weeks, trying to get perl
- included as part of the next base software release.  It won't happen,
- for the following reasons.
- 
- 1. The GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE 
- 	Our legal department has explicitly told R&D that they are
- 	not allowed to do anything with any program that got
- 	anywhere near this document.

        Sounds like a popular compliant..  A lot of people don't
understand, and therefore won't come near, the GPL.  My reading of the
GPL says that you can ship the software licensed under it, as long as
you don't charge extra for it, and you make the source available.

        And making source available is not that hard.  Just include an
additional product on the install tape, or an additional product tape
that contains nothing but the GPL covered source.

- 2.  No Support
- 	When a computer company ships out software, they will end up
- 	taking bug reports on it. [...]
- 
- 	My volunteering to pass any incoming perl bugs to Larry, and
- 	comp.lang.perl, isn't good enough.  Some R&D group must be
- 	willing to take on the responsibility, and the appropriate
- 	groups are in the usual understaffed/overworked condition.

        If you believe perl to already have an excellent self test
suite, as well as excellent support, why not collect a small group to
support it.  From what I have seen the group needn't be more than one or
two people, since the most popular answer will be "fixed in the next
release" anyway..  (and by the time the next release is put out, Larry
and Co.  will have fixed all those problems anyway..  :-)

- In short, while R&D might think that perl is the best thing since V7,
- those dreaded "business considerations" currently prevent our shipping
- this truely outstanding utility.
- 
- I've taken a shot at it here at HP/Apollo.  What about other companies?
- If I can say that our competition is shipping perl, that might swing
- some weight.  Is anyone spearheading an effort to get perl included in
- the "Real Unix" standards?

	[ I've tried to stay vendor neutral until now.  Now I'll put on
		my Convex employee hat. ]

        Well, Convex will be shipping perl as a supported product in the
9.0 release of the OS.  We are also shipping gnu emacs as a portion of
the standard release.  We provide complete sources for the product that
shipped with the release, as an optional product on the standard
utilities release tape.

        Support for perl and gnu emacs comes out of the normal
programming support pool for utilities and layered products.  I am a
portion of that programming support pool, and have yet to do any bug
fixes, etc to the perl sources.  I will admit to modifying Larry's
Makefile to use the Convex standard install procedure, but other than
that, I believe that we have not touched it.

        As a Convex employee, I'm glad that HP is not shipping perl with
their OS, that gives us another leg up on them.  (Not that Convex and HP
directly compete in the market place.)

        As a perl user, I'm disappointed in their managements view about
such a useful tool, and that I won't be able to find it on future
versions of my HP workstation (except for the fact that tchrist will
build it for internal use anyway)

-- 
Eric Schnoebelen	eric@cirr.com			schnoebe@convex.com
		Artificial Intelligence is neither -- it consists of quite
	natural people programming computers to do dumb things.
					- Bob Spitzer