J'accuse

[Flash Gordon]

Dik T. Winter a écrit :


Maybe.

I agree that some of them *do* earn from their work, if not directly
from it.

When I implemented a JIT for linux, I asked one of the people that
wrote that code a question.

The answer was that I needed a yearly software maintenance contract
from redhat for US$ 20 000.

It happens. You could have kept asking around for others who are not in
RedHat's pay. to help you.

This was significantly higher as Microsoft, that asks for US$ 2 000
for 3 questions in their MSDN contracts.
So?

Eventually, I solved it without asking questions. And no, the source
code of the compiler doesn't tell you anything.

How much it tells you depends on how good you are and how much time and
effort you put in. I've only needed to fix binutils, not gcc, since the
bugs I've found in gcc had already been fixed.

There isn't a single comment or technical description.

That is an exaggeration.

It is the generated code + hours in the debugger that led me to
the solution.

No, I am not telling you that what that developer did was wrong,
since they have to live from their work as I do.

As both of you are allowed to.

What I am telling
you is that it is the same thing I do.

No, what you do is different. You charge two groups of people for
licenses for you compiler, and without those licenses they are not
permitted to use it. The gcc developers don't charge for licenses but at
least *some* of them charge (or get a company to charge for them) for
support.

There is nothing wrong with either model, but they are different.

They did not paid for the development of that system. The biggest part
was done by unpaid programmers.

Actually they *do* pay programmers to do work developing it. So do IBM
and other companies.

Sure, but it will cost you so much work that nobody will do it.

Wrong. Look at CentOS (which is free and identical to RedHat Enterprise
Server apart from the branding and trade marked material). Also, I
believe, you should look at WhiteBox Linux.

Their reasoning is sound. That is why there are no comments in
GNU source code in the majority of applications.

That is *definitely* an exaggeration. I know because I had to do a fix
for binutils. The fix was done on my companies time (and therefor paid
for by my employer) and submitted back for free. Admittedly when they
say my fix they decided to do something slightly different, but I did
not charge them for my fix and they did not charge me for theirs. I also
did not hve to pay for binutils (or gcc or lots of other things) even
though I am using them for commercial purposes (and often charging for
installing free version of Linux).

No comments,
Wrong.


Wrong.

and it will change in a whim.

All software changes at the whims of those controlling it. Including
*your* compiler which changes at *your* whim.

Why?

Think for a moment.

Not for the reasons you think.

Your institue paid for commercial use then. Why is so bad that I do the
same?

Well, neither me nor my company paid for the company of Centos 5.3 which
I use almost daily for commercial purposes and which is identical to Red
Hat ES 5.3 (apart from branding). Nor did we pay for the copies I've
installed for severl companies, including large international companies
(we are a *small* international company). We did charge them for my time
doing the installation and configuration, but we charge the same daily
rate for installing & configuring commercial versions, Windows, MS SQL
Server, Oracle (on one occasions), our software and anything else we
install (we used to charge for installing SCO, but we don't do SCO any
more).

So a lot of people (including large international companies) use Linux
and other free software for free, some pay for services (such as
installation and support) and some pay for similar services for software
they have paid for (not necessarily paying the company that sells the
software).

Oh, and we also use SW (embedded in the software we sell) where the
license specifies you have to let the author know you are using it and
what for, and I duly notified the author and we paid nothing. I even
noted this in our documentation.

 

[Flash Gordon]

Chris M. Thomasson a écrit :

That has happened countless times. For instance, the University of Nice
had a copy of my software without paying me a single penny.

When I protested they did not cared to even answer my protests.

Other universities have been using it too, since I know when the
students ask me questions about it, or even want that I do their
homework!

That doesn't answer his question.

Many schools ask me for authorization since with disminishing
budgets they can't afford licenses. Sometimes I agree, sometimes
not.

That you sometimes don't agree implies that you think it is wrong.

Of course if somebody is making a lot of money with my software
I would sue him/her.

That strongly suggests you think it is wrong.

So why do you keep making posts that would suggest to people they *are*
allowed to do what you seem to think is wrong? Are you hoping that
someone will be miss-lead and that you will have a chance to sue them
for a singificant amount? If so consider that if they have that much
money they can also afford lawyers and investigators who are good enough
to find your posts here saying your compiler is free and use that as a
defense.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

>
> This fails to correspond with common usage. Nobody expects a
> corporation to get an "enterprise edition" for free. However, in
> contrast with, say, Flight Simulator, Navia's software is free.

What do you mean with "enterprise edition" in this context? I have looked
around a bit for downloadable places with lcc-win32 on it. I found one
place where it was advertised as freeware. I would think that if I
download it I could use it for any purpose I want. But that appears not
to be the case. I can not use the version I download free for any
purpose I want, only for personal use. And as far as I know there is
only *one* edition of lcc-win32.

 

[spinoza1111]

only commenting on one particular thing:
...
(some self-important doofus wrote)


It is amazing how often this nitwit (and his spiritual comrades) says
this phrase "You've been told this many times" (or variants, such as
"I've explained this many times"), as if it had any intellectual
currency at all.  I.e., as if either of the following carry any weight
at all:
    1) That the speaker (i.e., Dicky, Kiko, etc) said it.
    2) That they have said it multiple times (as if that saying
        something multiple times somehow magically makes something true).

It is also amazing and sad that this approach works on so many people.
So many people accept the above ridiculous assertions as true.


Indeed.  This is about the only sensible reaction to their posts.
They need to be told this more often.

I remembered this time to give you five stars. But more people need to
realize that there are genuine issues here. Geek self-hatred causes
people to think that fights like this are a tempest in a teapot: it
appears that Harter may think I'm as bad as Heathfield.

Gee, am I just another Heathfield? Is Obama Hitler?

Gee, I hope not. But I done read my Hobbes and Ah knows that we all
want power.

But as Galileo said, it still moves. Schildt was right to talk about
stacks, and Heathfield and Seebach are wrong. Moreover, they try to
destroy people who disagree with them.

 

[spinoza1111]

One can take the view, and I do, that there is no single language
called C.  Rather there is a suite of implementations clustered
around several focal points, e.g., the two ISO standards, K&R I,
and whatever Microsoft recognizes as C.  In my view, it is
perfectly legitimate for Jacob to say that he has an
implementation of C, and that it provides a variant of C.  It
isn't a conforming implementation of either ISO standard, but I
don't think Jacob is claiming that.  (I may be wrong.)

As a side note, when one takes into account bugs, it may be that
there are no comforming implementations.

Excellent point. Let's do quantum theory and accept a Copenhagen
interpretation. C is how programmers communicate their intentions as
to using computers, which is translated, not to "machine language" but
to a bitload that causes computers to do stuff according to the laws
of physics.

Certain human languages have less fuzzy boundaries than C: Esperanto,
perhaps. This is because of C's rather sordid history.

Today, C has too many dialects and is too "powerful" to be a rational
language even for the development of new operating systems and should
be abandoned. "Standardizing" it is lipstick on a pig, especially when
it involves the politics of personal destruction.

 

[Seebs]

Well that's exactly the same as GNU. I had the bad idea of using
libbfd.a in the linux version of lcc-win. I was told that since
my sofware isn't GNU I am forbidden to use it. And no, I did not
download the source code. I was just linking with the binaries.

That would, indeed, violate the terms of the GNU license.

Since commercial companies do not want to give away their source code
they can't use GNU unless they pay thousands of dollars...

I don't see how paying thousands of dollars would have helped.

Sure they can use gcc's binaries or read the source code. But
if they use a binary to link with their program they have to
pay.

I do not know of any amount of money for which you could purchase the
right to link libbfd.a with commercial software without distributing
the source.

I mean, any. I am not entirely sure any one entity has the right to
enter into such a licensing deal, and if an entity does, it's probably
the FSF, which I don't think would do so for any finite amount of money.

.... BTW, commercial companies do indeed give away source code in many
cases. It turns out, the source code is not the essence of the value
in the product.

-s

 

[jacob navia]

Dik T. Winter a écrit :

What do you mean with "enterprise edition" in this context? I have looked
around a bit for downloadable places with lcc-win32 on it. I found one
place where it was advertised as freeware. I would think that if I
download it I could use it for any purpose I want. But that appears not
to be the case. I can not use the version I download free for any
purpose I want, only for personal use. And as far as I know there is
only *one* edition of lcc-win32.

Well that's exactly the same as GNU. I had the bad idea of using
libbfd.a in the linux version of lcc-win. I was told that since
my sofware isn't GNU I am forbidden to use it. And no, I did not
download the source code. I was just linking with the binaries.

Since commercial companies do not want to give away their source code
they can't use GNU unless they pay thousands of dollars...

Sure they can use gcc's binaries or read the source code. But
if they use a binary to link with their program they have to
pay.

 

[Nick Keighley]

As technicians, you folks collectively seem to have a primitive,
almost theological understanding of the relationship of names to
reality,

as technical people we like to be precise in the language we use.
I f you want to waffle go and be socialogist, oh wait...

but the adjective "free" gets its meaning from the difference
between Jacob's software and Flight Simulator.

He could avoid these arguments by saying "lcc-win32 is free for
non-commercial use"

Short, unambiguous, correct.

 

[Nick Keighley]

No, he wrote twaddle as usual. We've been pestered with his cobblers in
other NGs. He's just a nasty bullying fascist.

Kenny is just an idiot. It's best not to respond to him.
Though for the benefit of the lurkers, it is worth occaisionally
pointing out that he's an idiot.

 

[Nick Keighley]

[note: I don't care if it's "open", "free" or whatever. Jacob can do
as he please with his own stuff. I'd just like it to be described
correctly]

did you read that bit. That was put in precisely to try and stop you
throwing a hissy-fit.

If defending yourself has become "throwing a hissy fit",

I was not attacking him

 

[jacob navia]

Kelsey Bjarnason a écrit :

Really? Good. Where's the download link for the free version usable for
all purposes - commercial, educational or otherwise?

Or were you simply lying again, because lying is the only way you can
promote your obviously worthless piece of crap compiler?

This person (Bjarnason) is a known linux activist.

He will tell stories about how linux runs wonderfully running
even the SQL server Mysql in the background in a machine
where windows crawls...

In general if you dare to say that GNU is not the best
since sliced bread a lot of insults will follow.

Mr Bjarnason runned around 2003 a company called silvesapphire.com,
that specialized in "Managed Migration from Windows to Linux".

His advocacy (and his virulence) is much easier to understand when
you see that he earns money with GNU stuff.

I use linux since 1996 or maybe earlier, but I am not this
kind of person. And surely people like this make
a disservice to linux

 

[Chris M. Thomasson]

If false, false. If true, so what?


Sounds about right to me. Windows has some important strengths, but
robustness and performance aren't two of them.

FWIW, Windows has enough fairly advanced synchronization primitives to
enable me to create very, very high performance user-space multi-threaded
algorithms. One very interesting API is:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683148(VS.85).aspx

I can use this to create a solution to the reader/writer problem that has
virtually zero-overhead for the readers. In any other OS, well, I have to
jump through hoops in order to reap similar behaviors. I don't see this type
of API in other operating systems. Too bad. Humm... Am I missing something?
Can I detect a synchronization epoch in any other operating system besides
Windows using user-space API's?

[...]

 

[Chris M. Thomasson]

FWIW, Windows has enough fairly advanced synchronization primitives to
enable me to create very, very high performance user-space multi-threaded
algorithms. One very interesting API is:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683148(VS.85).aspx

I can use this to create a solution to the reader/writer problem that has
virtually zero-overhead for the readers. In any other OS, well, I have to
jump through hoops in order to reap similar behaviors. I don't see this
type of API in other operating systems. Too bad. Humm... Am I missing
something? Can I detect a synchronization epoch in any other operating
system besides Windows using user-space API's?

Well, I can parse information from `stdin'. Take a look at the following
examples:


http://atomic-ptr-plus.sourceforge.net


It would be nice if other operating systems had an API that acted like
`FlushProcessWriteBuffers()'. Linux has `synchronize_rcu()', but I forgot if
it is a user-space API or not...

 

[Seebs]

This person (Bjarnason) is a known linux activist.
Horrors!

He will tell stories about how linux runs wonderfully running
even the SQL server Mysql in the background in a machine
where windows crawls...

Does he also tell stories about how cats are small and furry, and
water is often wet?

His advocacy (and his virulence) is much easier to understand when
you see that he earns money with GNU stuff.

Well, it's good to know that you don't charge money for yours, and that
you've clearly stated that it is free for all purposes, commercial or
otherwise, then!

-s

 

[Kenny McCormack]

Tim Streater <[email protected]> tried to put words together
thusly:
....

The "this" in question will have been explained or pointed out
innumerable times without refutation or sensible counter-argument.

Welcome to another episode of "Completely Missing The Point".

 

[Kenny McCormack]

I think that I can say without contradiction that you and
Heathfield are not in the same league.

Good. Something we can all agree on.

 

[Keith Thompson]

Really? Good. Where's the download link for the free version usable for
all purposes - commercial, educational or otherwise?

Or were you simply lying again, because lying is the only way you can
promote your obviously worthless piece of crap compiler?

Kelsey, I think you're overreacting here.

lcc-win32, according to its web page, is free for noncommercial use,
non-free for commercial use (that may be an oversimplification).
jacob's statement above that "I manage to give my software for free"
is consistent with that. He *does* give his software for free (i.e.,
at no monetary charge). He *also* sells it for money.

(And "obviously worthless piece of crap" appears to be based on
assumptions not in evidence in this discussion.)

jacob's statement quoted above was not a lie, and you were wrong to
accuse him of lying.

 

[Seebs]

jacob's statement quoted above was not a lie, and you were wrong to
accuse him of lying.

I'm not sure about this.

While the statement certainly could have a meaning which is true, it must
be understood in the context of the corpus of claims Jacob has made about
his code, and taken as a whole, they certainly do show a consistent pattern
of making representations that the software itself is "free", rather than
merely that there exist some circumstances under which it can be free.

-s

 

[Keith Thompson]

I'm not sure about this.

While the statement certainly could have a meaning which is true, it must
be understood in the context of the corpus of claims Jacob has made about
his code, and taken as a whole, they certainly do show a consistent pattern
of making representations that the software itself is "free", rather than
merely that there exist some circumstances under which it can be free.

Sure, but if you're going to accuse someone of lying, it's a bad
idea to do so on the basis of a statement that happens to be true.
(That's a generic "you".)

The quoted statement was:

Still I manage to give my software for free.

That statement is true, and I can think of no reasonable
interpretation, given the known facts, under which it's false.
jacob did not, in the quoted text, say or imply that he doesn't
also sell his software for money.

 

[Bart]

[snips]

Contrary to redhat, suse, and other companies that sell the work of
others, I sell only my work.

Elsewhere you admit that the compiler is based on code bought from
someone else, developed by someone else, or, in other words, someone
else's work.

You can, of course, prove that you have not only replaced every single
line of the original code with new code of your own developing, but also
that you have replaced the entire design with new principles of your own,
correct?

If not, then you're selling someone else's work, not just your own.

lccwin32 is based on the lcc project. Google "lcc download", I think
it's the second hit.

Anyone worried about paying a fee for lccwin32, is perfectly free to
download the lcc original project, and modify that for their purposes
(have fun with that).

But I've used lccwin32 for a few years without paying penny for it.
And anyone seriously using it for commercial work might think about
coughing up the euro 30 or whatever to make it legal (after all I'm
sure they didn't download their hardware for free!), but I suspect
many who should be paying a fee, aren't.

You know, it's bad enough you have to spew your crap in here where it's
not wanted, but then you have to be dishonest about whether or not it is
in fact free - a point you persist in muddying at every possible
opportunity, claiming over and over that it's available free when in fact
it's often not... but now you're reduced to outright lying.

Is your compiler really so pathetically bad and worthless that you can't
simply market it by honest means?  Is it so bad that if you did so,
*nobody* would ever use it?

Google "free C compiler". I think lccwin32 is the 3rd or 4th hit. I
would suggest comp.lang.c is the last place to advertise the product
especially with the huge amount of anti-jacob navia and anti-lccwin32
postings at present. I've chosen to reply to yours because it's one of
the nastiest.

If it's really that bad, you should simply stop distributing it.  If it's
*not* actually that bad, then there's no reason to resort to the sort of
behaviour you use to promote it.

I think a fair comparison is in order. What's the download link for
the Kelsey Bjarnason compiler?

Since you persist in non-topical posting and other dishonest techniques,
you demonstrate that you have very little faith in the product to make
its mark with a legitimate distribution methodology, meaning you give the
appearance of thinking the compiler is a worthless piece of crap.

Jacob's postings are often a welcome change from some of the extremist
and religious postings (about 'C', whatever that is, as not even the
experts agree) in this group. And yes, sometimes entertaining.

 What's
not clear is why you think anyone would *want* a compiler that's a
worthless piece of crap.  I certainly don't.

In the market for compilers of C (not a sexy language) dominated by
free downloads of giant compilers, some with state-of-the-art IDEs,
I'd say he's doing a very good job at it. And if he's making any money
at all, that seems a miracle to me.

Personally I happen to like human-scale software that is not
intimating (compare gcc with it's 1300 compiler options; it wasn't
11000 after all) and if I had to, I would pay for that benefit.