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Re: GNU Win32? Not anymore.



> Yes and No, Is it discrimination to say it's free, but "more" free for
> most uses. This sounds like animal farm, "4 legs good, 2 legs better". :-)

Huh?

I read it pretty clearly as "It's free unless you are our competitor, in
which case you have to negociate a special license with us." Did you not
read it this way? That sounds like a pretty clear violation of the
discrimination test.

I think it's pretty funny that they criticise their competitor for
porting GCC to the R5000 and never merging the code back in, since
Cygnus, not the competitor, is the the entity that is currently in
charge of merging patches back into GCC. They have been a problem with
merging in other patches as well, such as the Pentium optimization ones.

I think that the problem is that the founders of CyGNUs are no longer
involved with the company, and the business people who are now in charge
have come to realize that being in the free software business is not as
profitable as being in the embedded systems business like Wind River with
its $1.1 Billion valuation. They see their product going into building the
Sojurner rover (it's running Wind River) and they get no credit and their
competitors stock goes up, and they get annoyed. Those business people
don't have the same principles as the founders of CyGNUs, they have no
love for free software, they just want to own their work now.

If they had wanted to be fair about keeping the software free, they would
have made a license that _required_ people who derive software to feed back
the changes that they made to it. That would have taken care of most of
their complaints without restricting who used the software for what.

Commercial companies should contribute to free software, but they
shouldn't necessarily become the main maintainers of it. Who wants
to send patches back to Cygnus when Cygnus is their direct competitor?
I'd rather send the patches to SPI.

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP   bruce@pixar.com   510-215-3502
Finger bruce@master.debian.org for PGP public key.
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