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From: mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: GNU Make 3.58 on HP-UX 7.0 ?
Message-ID: <7370218@hpfcso.HP.COM>
Date: 27 Sep 90 19:59:53 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.201337.15659@bpdsun1.uucp>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lines: 26

>Two more reasons to use gdb:
>1) It can be used to debug C++ code (at least code compiled with g++)

Ah, but xdb (more particularly xdb++) supports HP C++, and from what I have
heard does a much better job than gdb/g++ (I have no personal experience here).

>How about some support for GNU products by HP?

The GNU license agreement pretty much forbids us from providing any reasonable
kind of support.  In particular, we could not sell any of it (only give it
away), so it would be hard to fund the support.

Actually, no one has really managed to make sense out of Stallman's copyleft
from a legal standpoint; we are forced to assume the most restrictive
interpretation.

That, plus we have a significant investment in our products, and many customers
have an investment in some of our value added features like FPA support,
Fortran, etc.  At best we would have to support both our own products and
Gnu's, and we don't have the resources for that.

--------------
Marc Sabatella (marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com)
Disclaimers:
	2 + 2 = 3, for suitably small values of 2
	Bill and Dave may not always agree with me