Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hpfcso!mjs From: mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: GNU Make 3.58 on HP-UX 7.0 ? Message-ID: <7370221@hpfcso.HP.COM> Date: 2 Oct 90 16:05:01 GMT References: <1990Sep17.201337.15659@bpdsun1.uucp> Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA Lines: 61 NOTE: I am not speaking for HP here, just spouting my own personal prejudices. >the gnu license doesnt forbid you (or anyone else) from providing >support. on the contrary, it, and the manifesto talk a great deal >about support is one of the things that you should be able to charge >money for. the only thing you cant do is make changes to the >programs, distribute those programs and not provide other people with >the source to those changes. you _can_ charge for distributing those >changes though. I had something different in mind here. Say I make substantial improvements to a Gnu product. I sell it to a few customers. I give away the source, which is then distributed freely over the net. Now everyone has access to my improvements. Why would people continue to buy from HP if they could just get the latest and greatest versions of everything for free? Well, one might say they would buy it so that they could get HP support, but who needs HP support if everyone has the source? Worse, people may expect to HP to support their locally hacked versions of tools we supplied source to, and that would be difficult. So we could well end up in a situation where no one actually bought our product any more, hence we couldn't justify the fincancial resources to support it. I do agree that for simple tools like "grep" and "make", this is not really a concern. We don't expect to make a profit from these. But what about our C++ compiler, which we do sell as a separate product? If we sold g++ unmodified, then perhaps we wouldn't need to support it, but realistically, we'd want to add our own value to the product, sell it, and use the profits in part to pay for the support. >lots of people have made sense out of stallman's copyleft. DG, Next, >and surprisingly Apple all distribute gnu software in one form or >another. That doesn't mean they have it completely straightened out, it just means they have decided they can probably get away with what they are doing. And again, I agree that for simple tools, there is no harm and probably value. On the other hand, you don't need HP to supply you these sources; you can get them anywhere. Any effort spent by HP in collecting and distributing these sources is effort that could have been spent in adding value to products you could not have gotten from other sources. This is admittedly not that great a concern. But consider this. We currently use the same backend source for both our Fortran and C compilers. This makes testing, maintenance, and adding value a lot easier. Now suppose we roll to Gnu's C compiler. We might well want to retrofit our Fortran front end to Gnu's backend. Would we be required to give out sources to our Fortran front end? This is unclear to me. Yet our Fortran front end is one of our major competitive advantages over other companies - we have implemented more VAX extensions than anyone else, even the compiler for DEC's own RISC workstation. If we had to give away these sources (obviously we have no patents to protect this stuff, after, it is only reverse engineered to mimic the VAX compiler), we could easily lose that advantage. Sorry for flying off the handle a little bit earlier. I've been doing that a lot lately. -------------- 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