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From: mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: BISON, GCC, and the GNU public license. (Re: increasing yacc states)
Message-ID: <105@euteal.ele.tue.nl>
Date: 14 Aug 89 07:07:28 GMT
References:  <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <26609@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5271@ficc.uu.net> <14699@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> <95@euteal.ele.tue.nl> <714@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 48

In article <714@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>I use stuff from the net and GNU software all the time and it often
>works better than much of the commercial software I've used.  So your
>experience is not universal.

We have several commercial packages at our side and they all work
well and have excellent support.

>When you say "the easy parts", you make it sound like GNU software
>isn't very good and, indeed, rather trivial.  Perhaps you think C
>compilers are trivial.  Gcc is one of the best C compilers I've seen.

Gnu starts out by relying on the vendor supplied !commercial! software
they despise. If they were honest guys, they would start off with writing
their own operating system. Anyone can write an editor or a diff remake
or maybe even a C compiler. I guess their C compiler is so popular,
mainly because it is better than the one supplied by Sun which is bad.
By the way the Gnu C compiler doesn't run on any machine we have
(hp, alliant, apollo).
When you talk about the quality of the
gnu software: several years ago we have been porting Emacs to our
hp9000s500. It contained lots of bugs and faulty programming. Just
think of how long ago this program was written. Its about time
it worked.

>>Their support is nop.
>
>We get new releases fairly frequently.  I've had much worse service
>for commercial software.
Probably true but there are ok software vendors too.

>>It's rather dumb to believe that a couple of students and some people who
>>are wasting away their bosses time can provide all the software we need.
>
>What are you talking about?
As far as I know, most of the gnu software is written by students and
by people with a job during lunch breaks (don't take this too literally).
Anayway I don't see why the gnu stuff must be better than commercial
software. People writing programs make bugs. Ever scanned all the bug
reports and fixes of gnu tools??




Mart van Stiphout
-------------------------------
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop