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> During the UNIX freebie days no one cared about Stalmman's freedoms. On the contrary, they cared plenty, because GNU freedoms let them have a usable, reasona
by einpoklum 3y ago
> During the UNIX freebie days no one cared about Stalmman's freedoms.
On the contrary, they cared plenty, because GNU freedoms let them have a usable, reasonable-quality (and sometimes high-quality) environment both as developers and as users, which they could otherwise not get unless they were rich or employed by a corporation (who would then have them do what it wanted, not what they might have wanted to spend their time on).
- pjmlp 2y agoNo they didn't, that is why before Stalmman, most UNIX stuff was either free because AT&T wasn't allowed to charge for UNIX as commercial product, or MIT/BSD license. Which is how UNIX workstation market came to be, and how even Windows ended up with BSD code on the networking stack.
- p_l 2y agoGCC usage IIRC exploded when Sun made their compiler suite extra paid option instead of bundled as part of standard SunOS install. Before that, GCC was of interest particularly on platforms that didn't provide good CC - a lot more platforms with various quality of software - by comparison the big name workstation vendors that survived longer also had higher quality compilers. When compiler suite was included by standard, GCC had much less of a benefit to many users (I think gdb actually might have driven more?)