Defending GCC considered futile

Re:Defending GCC considered futile by davidw on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:37AM (#9027725)

> Am I missing something, or is this fear of corporations totally unjustified?

Sun Microsystems basically grabbed BSD development by hiring up a lot of good people and running with it. It took a while for the various free BSD's to come into their own.

Basically, with "bsd licensed" software, if a big company hired up all the developers, they could take it proprietary and out-compete fork efforts.

I don't think it happens often, but it's not impossible, either.

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Re:Defending GCC considered futile by hga on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:43AM (#9027773)

Really???

The AT&T lawsuit and the end of DARPA BSD funding and that research group at UCB didn't have a lot to do with that? That was several years after Sun got in bed with AT&T and announced that BSD based SunOS was doomed.

I don't know, but I wonder.

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Re:Defending GCC considered futile by davidw on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:49AM (#9027827)

There are lots of factors, and you can't exactly rerun the experiment a number of times, tweaking all of them.

There's also the fact that the internet was far less available in that day and age, making it more difficult to get good people involved.

I don't think it's a big risk, but like I said, I don't think it's impossible either.

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Re:Defending GCC considered futile by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @10:59AM (#9027935)

> Basically, with "bsd licensed" software, if a big company hired up all the developers, they could take it proprietary and out-compete fork efforts.

Well, look, sure, if you hire all the developers that are working on something and understand it, you can probably out-compete other implementations even if all you have the old developers do on your proprietary project is write up specs from which a different set of developers build a legally non-derivative interoperable implementation.

That may be a risk with permissively-licensed Free software, but its also a risk with copyleft Free software and proprietary software.

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Re:Defending GCC considered futile by davidw on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @11:05AM (#9027990)

My experience is that specs - even will written ones - are far enough from working, tested code that it's going to be significantly easier to take the BSD project proprietary than to build a competitor to a GPL licensed one from scratch. Also, to be attractive to the 'core group', I think working on new stuff is more interesting.

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