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FSF, GCC, and SCO Compiler Support
Ancipital was one of several who noted that a
special patch is going into GCC. The file is README.SCO, and it is a short writeup about the SCO situation written by the FSF. It stops short of demanding that GCC developers strip SCO support from the compiler, and says more will be announced before the next compiler release.
SCO don't care about GCC support of their OS, they do not are a software company anymore but a litigation company.
Stripping SCO support from GCC will only harm SCO's old customers who don't have anything to do with SCO evil.
There is no reason to continue to support SCO. In fact, I think this action is immediately necessary to let potential licensees of SCO know that they will NOT have a free compiler if they buy SCO/Unix.
There is no reason not to defend the free software community against the illegal actions of SCO. This aggression will not stand.
SCO has profiteered off of the goodwill and charity of millions of programmers across the world. How are they repaying you? By suing you into oblivion and STEALING your code!
This is not the time to be benevolent and charitable. This is the time to be assertive and not let them bully you around.
I strongly urge the likes of the FSF and RedHat, who has already established a legal "defense" fund to also establish a legal "offense" fund and start fighing SCO for violating the GPL and the Copyrights of every developer that had their code distributed by SCO in violation of the GPL.
Everyone is so worried that the GPL won't hold water in court. If you're so worried, than it won't. The time to test the GPL is NOW, so that any weaknesses can be found and corrected.
SCO needs to be taken seriously no matter how irrational or stupid their claims become. Remember that the people they pack juries with are usually just as stupid and irrational.
For obvious reasons I cannot comment on this. I have an opinion but I cannot share it. All I can say is that from what I have read publically, SCO is not charging for other people's IP but what they believe to be their own. But this is off-topic. This thread was about my involvement with the GCC project.
I'm sure that as an individual, you're a person of enormous ability and integrity. However, you work for a company that has proven themselves time after time to be little better than whoremasters.
Since my brain was compiled with gcc -pedantic, I must point out that in effect, since they are my masters (at least at work) you are calling me a whore :) I'm just kidding trying to keep this light ... dont take offence :)
And can you, in all conscience, argue that open source coders are making a rational decision if they voluntarily allow any of their efforts to be used by SCO, their employees, their customers or their developers?
Well, yes I can. There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there. Unless I am missing something SCO is not suing, nor have they stated any intention to, nor do I believe they ever would, any of those projects. Please bare in mind that the scope of the lawsuit is confined to breach of contract with IBM, not against the entire community. The fact that the community has missed this point and taken that lawsuit as having a much broader scope than it does is unfortunate.
However, I would like to address your actual question. I understand that people are upset with SCO, I even understand why. However, GCC is a program, it is not a political platform. That program runs on multiple architectures, one of which is SCO OpenServer. Even though the majority of my contributions are aimed at improving support for that platforms, not all are. Even if all my contributions were SCO-centric, they still have value beyond the scope of the individual platform. Each platform has its quirks and nuances, and when those quirks and nuances exposes wekanesses in the overal design of the program, addressing those weaknesses helps improve the program for everybody. Even though my contributions are SCO-centric, this too is not unusual. Linux folks tend to submit Linux-centric patches, FreeBSD folks submit FreeBSD-centric patches etc. It is simply the nature of the beast. In order for the open source model to really work, you generally take code where it is offered.
I am a geek. I love writing code, and I do so at every opportunity I get. The fact that I work for a company that is in disfavour with the community does not (or should not) have any bearing on contributions to open source projects. But look at some of the history of this particular project. At one point, Microsoft was public enemy #1, yet people still worked really hard to get things like DJGPP and Cygwin working, all the while trying to rally support against Microsoft. If you (or others) are real geeks, then I am surprised you care so much. Its all about the code and the joy of coding. All this political stuff makes my head ache :)
Having said that ... I am off to do another make bootstrap on gcc 3.4 :) Have an absolutely fabulous timezone.
Kean