Re: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias)

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Matt Seitz wrote:

> Sorry, I didn't make my point clearly enough.  Yes, the BSD offers the
> possibility of creating a better compiler and making a profit from it.  But
> Brett's argument was that so long as a no-cost, "good enough" compiler was
> available, no one would ever pay enough to justify the creation of a better
> compiler.  In other words, even if GCC went to a BSD license today, anyone
> attempting to sell an improved version would never get enough customers to
> justify the cost of development.

He could be right, but I tend to believe there's always likely to be a 
market for a better compiler that runs faster and/or uses less resources 
and/or makes faster code and/or makes smaller code.  Yes, the market for a 
"good enough" compiler is much larger, but there's probably enough market 
for a profit incentive for a proprietary improvement.

Now, to program a free improvement under the GPL, on the other hand, I'm 
not convinced there's much incentive there.  There's incentive to port to 
new platforms to leverage all that code, but to improve the compiler 
without adding features?  It's probably not worth it to most companies to 
do it for themselves alone, and without a profit incentive, why do it for 
others, either?

Back around 1990-ish, GCC was generally considered to have one of the best 
code generators out there; it was often better than proprietary compilers.  
In recent years, I've heard numerous claims of proprietary compilers that 
outperform GCC on various platforms.  Now, surely that's partly because 
they can optimize for a given target platform, but could it also partly be 
that once GCC got to be "good enough", there wasn't incentive to make it 
lots better than that?

Deven