dal@syntel.UUCP (Dale Schumacher) (07/26/89)
[schmidt@glacier.ics.uci.edu (Doug Schmidt) writes...] > In article <796@mitisft.Convergent.COM>, kemnitz@mitisft (Gregory Kemnitz) writes: >>Due to copyleft (see thread on comp.lang.c++) gcc cannot be used on >>production code. > > Sorry to pollute yet another news group with endless digressions on > interpreting the GNU copyleft... However, Gregory Kemnitz's statement > above is NOT TRUE. GCC certainly can and is being used to compile > commercial production code. > > The problematic issues under discussion in comp.lang.c++ involves > certain GNU *libraries*, e.g., libg++. I refer you to the past 2 or 3 > weeks of posting on that news group for more details. I suppose now would be as good a time as any to announce that a TRULY PUBLIC DOMAIN implementation of libc for GCC and several other compilers is currently under development. The libc which came with my C compiler (on the ST) was extremely poor, so after I got fed up with it I decided to rewrite the whole thing, trying to do it right. I released the first version of dLibs in October 1987. Since then it has been improved and further debugged, with help from several generous software developers, and the 1.2 version, released in October 1988, has been distributed with the Sozobon C compiler (also PD, and very nice). Both have seen world-wide use on the Atari ST, and parts of dLibs have been included in projects for other machines. It's about time for another release. This seems like a good time to bring the library up as close as possible to X3J11 and POSIX. It also looks like there might be a wider use for dLibs than just ST users, since GCC is lacking a truly free library with which to develop commercial applications. The libc distributed with GCC on the ST, both under TOS (the native MS-DOS like OS) and Minix (a V7 Unix clone), is derived largely from dLibs. I'm collecting together several varient versions of dLibs (like the current GCC port) and source code from other public domain packages (like the PD libdir and getopt code) to put together a library which will work under Minix (and port easily to other *nix varieties) as well as TOS (maybe portable to MS-DOS?). Since I'm sure that I'm not aware of all of the public domain library pieces which are available, I'd ask the authors of such code (Henry Spencer, Doug Gwyn, etc.) to remind me of what they have written and made available in the public domain. I hope this project will be of benefit to a large number of people, and anything you can do to make it easier will be greatly appreciated. \\ / Dale Schumacher 399 Beacon Ave. \\ / (alias: Dalnefre') St. Paul, MN 55104-3527 >< ...umn-cs!midgard.mn.org!syntel!dal United States of America / \\ "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, / \\ which is the exact opposite." -Bertrand Russell