Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

2 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. 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 --

  2. 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.