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

Am Don, 2002-06-13 um 10.27 schrieb Roger Fujii:

> Exactly.  If you want a real world example of this, look at gcc on linux vs
> java.  Gcc is pretty much the only game in town.  You are stuck with its
> profilers, debuggers and code generation.  

That's not true. There are commercial compilers out there, as well as
debuggers and profilers. Unfortunately for those companies, they don't
seem to produce so  much higher quality than the GNU team that many
people consider the enormous prices worth paying. It is certainly out of
the question for home user, and from my experience in the past I can
tell that it is very tough for e.g. research institutes, too.

Look at Fortran: although it is a widely used language among scientists
who usually don't have large funds to spend on software, there is no
functional free software Fortran 90/95 compiler. There are some
commercial compilers, but not more than for C. They are all horrendously
expensive. Their debugging tools clearly fall short of gdb, unless you
are willing to spend another $10000 on a debugger. Some of the compilers
are plain buggy, their command line options are a nightmare. Obviously
the GNU project and the GPL have nothing to do with this situation. When
G95 is finished, these products will crumble. In the meantime, many
people will rather port their code to C or C++ and use gcc than pay for
mediocre products.

> java, on the other hand, even
> though it's free (as in beer), has a wealth of diversity (forte, jbuilder,
> not to mention the small vendors) in development tools (and jvms, profilers,
> compilers, etc).  Any honest person cannot dismiss that GPL has a hand in
> this situation as the GPL denies any party from carving out a nitch to attempt
> to make a living.  

The vast amount of Java implementations is a consequence of the Java
hype that came at the same time with the Internet and e-business hype -
Java gold rush.
When Java becomes as venerable as C is now, it is likely that much of
this diversity will have vanished, and that a free software tool will be
the standard just as gcc is now for C (if Java lives that long at all). 

> The real reason is that
> as CPUs get more complicated, the compilers are also more complicated to make
> and there aren't a huge number of people qualified to work on it.  And, given
> the lack of financial incentive on working on it, it's easy to show why the gcc
> is where it is today.

Have you stepped forward and offered the gcc team your assistance?
Are you aware that a lot of Big Players have contributed code to gcc in
order to quickly have a reliable compiler for their new hardware?
AFAIK the source code availability for gcc is of crucial importance for
CPU developers. This may of course not hold for Sun, because they have
their own compilers.

Martin

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