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SCO Makes Open Source Contributions
Ethanol writes: "SCO announced this morning that they're releasing cscope (a really, really sharp development tool for large C/C++ projects) and will soon release fur (a profiling/analysis/reordering tool for relocatable binaries that can speed up execution times quite a bit) under the BSD license. See their press release for details. "
IIRC there was a less than 100,000 lines limit for cs. Do you know if this is a problem still?
They (supposedly) have and will continue to use software stolen from BSD - the Win2K TCP stack apparently bears great resemblence to the OpenBSD stack.
Hold on a minute there. I'm no fan of MS, but to call this stealing really misses the point. The BSD license specifically allows you to use licensed code in non-open commercial apps. Even if Win2K's TCP is an exact copy of BSD, it's not "stolen", because the license says it's OK. If it was GPLed code it'd be a different matter, but how can a copy of BSD code be "stolen"?
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Cool, but where on the website are the ancient Unix versions?
(This is not flamebait, I am serious.)
Are you Cliff Stoll?
cool. I've been thinking for a while that one of the things that mkae programs unnecessarily slow are ordering problems in libraries, symbol resolution and other dl* magic. if this 'fur' program makes that faster, we'll have to say thanks SCO.
Hmm I'd pay many adulations to then email privately :)
You might try id-utils too (check freshmeat). I use id-utils.el in Emacs a lot on code I'm unfamiliar with. If you want to see who calls the function you're on, you just hit M-x gid and you get a list of hits in the compile buffer. Then you can just iterate through the list. Pretty cool.
The thing I like about cscope, from what I've seen, is that it does more and generates the ID file dynamically. Choices are good!
According to my personal experience with Open
Source projects (http://phplib.netuse.de) it
takes at least 6 months starting with the release
of proper documentation until you get the first
developers who really grok what is going on.
It takes at least 12 months for the project
to get a proper community which is able to
self-support itself. Finding developers with
a vision who are able to develop the project
beyond its current scope depends on luck and
charisma. No time scope can ge given for that.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Secondly, I'd like to say that SCO is very brave releasing as BSD instead of GPL or a custom-designed licence deisgned to protect them. Under the BSD license, (IANAL) incorporation into proprietary products is allowed - that means that Mickeysoft could go off and take SCO's stuff and come out with Visual (insert name of SCO tool here)++. Good for them - it shows true faith in the Open Source community.
Thirdly, this might be an experiment by SCO on Open Source. Let's not let them down - further openings will be good. Let's not forget that there is some virtue to SVR4 Unix, and I'd like to see some of those tools and abilities on Linux.
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Visit
Putting aside the grammatical curiosity of how you historically preserve something, rather than preserving something historic, does this mean I can log in and look at old SYSV code, or is this something else entirely that I'm not getting?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Xenix was actually an offshoot of Microsoft work, so it seems unlikely that Microsoft would say it couldn't be done.
sigs are a waste of space
One of the big things Open Source advocates have been asking companies to do is BSD or GPL applications that they plan to drop support for. If they no longer plan to profit off them, why not allow the users to keep, maintain, and improve them. The real answer is the upgrade treadmill, but no need to discuss that.
I am not terribly familiar with this product, but obviously this is a good thing, you can learn something from any sample of code.
What I wonder, is when companies release their source code like this, how much do users pick it up, redistribute, etc.? I mean, Darwin and Mozilla looked dead for a while, but then they picked open some help (I know Mozilla did, did Darwin?). Mozilla and Darwin were HUGE projects, it makes sense that users took a while to jump in there. On the otherhand, will a project like this be picked up and improved by proponents of open source, or will we just say, "finally, they get it" take their software and run?
I mean, the idea is, according to RMS, we have a fundamental right to copy digital data, and that licenses that prohibit this are fundamentally immoral, so he'll write a free OS that we can copy.
The Linux community says, we'll work with corporate interests, because they can sell support. We'll help improve the product, and you can sell support for it and make lots of money.
Now, is the latter true? Are we helping the companies that are releasing their source code with the promise that we will help, or are we grabbing their code and adding the useful bits into our pet GPL projects?
Alex
Now all we need is lint...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is bound to start a flamewar of some sort, but it's a question that I've wondered about for a while and the nifty GUI to this inspires it: I've found that Tcl/Tk is great for whipping up interfaces to C code but I remember that there were a lot of hard words spoken about the licensing by RMS. Is there still considered to be a problem with this for Free projects? If so then what other routes do people take for easily-portable GUI'ed software? Python+mxWindows? Qt? Gtk? I don't really like the last two options because of what I perceive as the amount of work involved in becoming familiar with them, but perhaps I'm wrong?
<offtopic> Also, does anyone know how to get around the size limit using etags? < /offtopic >
Why is it only 13.0? The latest version available from AT&T is 13.7, I think. I had a copy of 13.3 at a previous job, and I "ported" it to linux as well (there were maybe 2 minor changes needed). There is a commercial release available at http://www.gtlinc.com/Products/Cscope/cscope.html, which they call 14.0.
It will be a very welcome addition to have cscope join the ranks of code management tools - it's something I use at work a lot to navigate very quickly through a vast amount of code, and it has different strengths and weakness when compared with etags (Emacs Tags for the uninitiated).
From my experience, cscope wins over Etags for navigation because it produces lists of likely jump points, whereas etags invoke with a tags search can leave you at some first level define which is not necessarily where you want to be (multiple #ifdef #define ... type calls muck up the etag reference lists). Cscope is also pretty speedy with its reference database, and can be stacked inside an editor, so you can do cscope -> editor -> cscope -> editor and then you can work back out by quiting the chosen level which makes it nice for chasing ideas through the code.
On the other hand, the tight integration between etags and Emacs means that etags still comes in very useful for traversal of source files - it just doesn't quite offer the same flexibility that cscope does.
Of course, I may have just started a major holy war, but such is life ...!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
In that case, I have no trouble correcting your sig ;) It is "nickel" not "quarter." I have the Dilbert on my wall here. :)
There has been a free version of cscope for quite a while now. It's called cs and available from ftp://cantor.informatik.rwth-aache n.de/pub/unix/.
Both versions work with the graphical tcl/tk interface cbrowser.
--
**Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... **
:)
I respectfully disagree. Instead of viewing it as competition they could have viewed it as free promotion for *nix and embraced it. Linux was the media darling. You couldn't click on a website without seeing Linux. That was the marketing opportunity of a lifetime. All they had to do was come out and pay lip service to Linux for a ton of free PR. They had to realize that people were going to try Linux regardless of what they said. Why shoot yourself in the foot?
I don't wish any ill-will on them but I think you will see them slowly go away (they already are) as Linux becomes more enterprise ready.
Also...this looks like a nifty tool, but it seems like they are just throwing us a bone. Come on guys, if you want to do something for the Linux community give us the good stuff