[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

[Rich Pieri]

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.