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The Cygnus Tree and Free Software Maintenance

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the a-heaping-helping-of-code dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Sokolov (a Special Agent of the International Free Computing Task Force - and that's not a joke!) has published an interresting article about how is maintened gcc, gdb and the GNU compilation toolchains on his ftp site (also send to several related mailing lists - gcc, gdb, etc..) It points at some problem and one may think that Cygnus-Redhat is again trying to take over the linux world... but that's not the point." The conspiracy theorists will definitely find room for conspiracy, but really this looks like a major issue for development, and one that warrants discussion.

6 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. 1st: Research article, 2nd: Post article by dmccarty · · Score: 4
    If Slashdot would do some reasearch on their articles before blindly posting whatever an A.C. submits they might have some more integriy in their stories. Kudos to Arstechnica, for example, for doing a much better job in this regard.

    Michael Sokolov "maintained" the gcc toolchain (for the PalmOS) much in the same way an armed gunman maintains his hostages in a bank holdup. After hijacking the (Palm) gcc project from John Marshall ("official" maintainer who works for Palm, see his earlier comment) he bombarded the palm-dev-forum incessantly, ranting about how his toolchain was better and personally attacking anyone who voiced an opinion otherwise.

    Eventually, the list owners (Palm) banished him from the forum, and hopefully that's the last Palm developers have seen or heard of him. I don't doubt that he's a great programmer, but his back-handed ways of going about "maintaining" the gcc toolchain have made him quite a few enemies. Slashdot would be wise to look these things up before proclaiming him some sort of anti-cygwin hero.
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    Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
  2. International Free Computing Task Force? by IIO · · Score: 4

    Excuse my ignorance, but could anybody fill me in on the "International Free Computing Task Force"?

    What kind of an organization is it?
    Who are the officers of the organization?
    What is their charter?
    Where is their headquarters?
    Is it a for profit organization or a non-profit organization?
    What are some of their past activities?
    Are they affiliated with any public or private companies?
    Are they affiliated with any governments?
    Are they affiliated with any universities?
    Can anyone join the task force?
    What credentials does one have to poccess to become a member?
    How many members do they have?

    I'm just curious about this organization because I have never heard of it before.

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  3. Cygnus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5


    Note that Cygnus isn't just some greedy corporation -- it employs many of the hard-core free software engineers which make up the FSF. These people aren't being held at gunpoint to work there -- they work there because they think it's a great deal to be employed full-time to contribute to free software.

    When Cygnus "took control" of gcc from RMS, it was for very good reason. RMS had not been competently maintaining the source tree, and many would-be code contributors who had good solutions to genuine problems were getting increasingly disgusted. The more gung-ho of them formed splinter groups, while others simply walked away. It was a bad situation, and Cygnus dealt with it by starting their own source repository, contributing several remarkable improvements (like Jim Wilson's gcse), and going out of their way to gather up the various splinter-groups that RMS had alienated.

    Many people got very excited over the "Experimental GNU Compiler System" and stopped even bothering to submit their code updates to RMS's "official" repository. When RMS finally relented and told Cygnus to go ahead and take over the job, he had essentially a dead project on his hands.

    Cygnus is full of genuine FSF engineers trying to do what is best for free software. They are not outsiders trying to take things over.

    Disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with Cygnus or RedHat. In fact, I pretty much despise RedHat .. it feels like MS-Linux to me: "We're cool, so we use really needlessly monolithic and complicated tools that don't work very well .. we want to make using the system as easy as possible for the end-user, so we make it look and act a lot like Windows, and if something goes wrong our configuration tools are too rigid and fragile and provide you with insufficient information to let you fix things up very easily .. we don't care about compatability with others, but that's okay because WE'RE THE STANDARD LINUX DISTRIBUTION so it's really the rest of you who are incompatible with us! We are RedHat baby, jackbooted penguin from hell, and we're out to make Gates look like a cub scout!"

    -- Guges --

  4. It may point at a problem, but not one at Cygnus.. by John+Marshall · · Score: 5
    There's already been some interesting discussion of this on the GCC mailing list, and all the other lists Michael posted it to.

    In general, I like to recommend that people do a little research before they take what Michael says too literally. Unfortunately, Google seems to have got bored with Michael's magnum opus (the page in which he describes his love for the GNU project is particularly fun), but it still lists many of the other mailing lists Michael has tortured over the years.

  5. GCC and EGCS history by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 4
    When Cygnus "took control" of gcc from RMS, it was for very good reason. RMS had not been competently maintaining the source tree, and many would-be code contributors who had good solutions to genuine problems were getting increasingly disgusted.
    RMS had not been maintaining GCC at all. He had stoped working on GCC and left maintenance to Richard Kenner. Everybody involved with GCC (EGCS) agrees RK is an excellent compiler engineer, but meny felt he wasn't a good release engineer. EGCS was created as an experiment, to see if a different form would attract more outside contributions. This was done in agreement with RMS. The experiment was a success, EGCS became the officiel GCC, and RK now work as a compiler engineer on the new GCC team.
  6. Crazy by ximenes · · Score: 4
    In case you're wondering why Agent Sokolov doesn't seem to make much sense, here's a little explanation.

    He's obsessed with 4.3BSD, and is trying to recreate pristine sources of it so as to continue to use it well into the next millenium (with as few modifications as possible, of course).
    He thinks that 10BaseT is the "evil intruder" in the world of network cabling; 10Base2 is acceptable, but 10Base5 is the One True Cable.
    He made his own version of gzip and switched one of the bytes in the header; it's incompatible, but it's Sokolovian.

    How do I know this? He used to work at CWRU before he made death threats against the president and VP of IS. Then they threw him in the nuthouse. Apparently he's loose again and on the rampage.