[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

Those earlier compilers were free in the sense that you didn't have to
pay for them, but most were not freely distributable in the way that
GCC is. For starters, they were offered only for operating systems
that were not in themselves free. And most of them did not distribute
source code, so they could not be modified to work with other
processors or OSes.

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/2015 3:55 AM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> I'm not certain, but I think that 386BSD and Linux would have never
>> happened without the GCC compiler suite.   I don't recall any other
>> freely distributable C compilers being available when they were first
>> being developed.
>
> I can name several: Sun used to distribute their C compilers at no cost
> prior to the Solaris rename. Digital did the same with compilers for
> Ultrix. Digital also put a C compiler on one of the DECUS tapes.
>
> And there is, of course, K&R's original C compiler.
>
> While not no cost, Microsoft Xenix came with compilers, and Borland was
> in the business of selling Pascal and C++ compilers at very reasonable
> costs.
>
> It wasn't so much that GCC was free (in any sense) as it was that GCC
> was substantially better than OS vendors' compilers. Back in the day it
> produced better, faster code than most commercial compilers (the Borland
> compilers may have been better). GNU (the operating system) looked like
> it was going to happen soon. It was a credible threat to their
> businesses. GNU was serious competition. They stepped up, improved their
> products, started surpassing GCC.
>
> GNU and RMS proved them wrong. They've stated and demonstrated that they
> care more about the license than they care about making great software.
> It might be more accurate to say that they believe it is the license,
> rather than functionality and usability, that makes software great.
>
> GCC and the GNU tools certainly facilitated Minix and Linux but they
> were not instrumental in their development and growth. Had they not
> existed then something else would have been used.
>
>> Even today the Linux kernel developers typically
>> use GCC rather then the main free competitor (LLVM/Clang).   FreeBSD,
>> for example, used GCC by default until version 10 (released in 2014!).
>
> The BSDs are moving away from GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang. It's a better
> compiler suite. Apple have been of great assistance in this being a
> heavy FreeBSD source user with a 10-year head start in switching from
> GCC to LLVM.
>
> Getting the vanilla Linux kernels to compile with LLVM is a nearly
> complete work in progress.
>
> --
> Rich P.
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