From: Kendall Bennett <KendallB AT scitechsoft DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Watcom C++ opened?
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:59:40 -0700
Organization: SciTech Software, Inc.
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Message-ID: <MPG.140f48ba8ba45841989682@news.newsguy.com>
References: <uuo5qsg1nj0uisvlj8dbum16k9r0cvv4ae AT 4ax DOT com> <200008222126 DOT RAA23165 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com>
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

In article <200008222126 DOT RAA23165 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com>, dj AT delorie DOT com 
says...

> > >The Open Watcom compiler products are the first and only
> > >mass-market commercial compilers to be open sourced
> > 
> > Wrong.  Cygwin GNUPro.
> 
> I think they meant proprietary, not commercial.  Obviously they don't
> really understand what they're talking about, so there's not much
> point arguing against them.

DJ, you should know better than anyone that we *do* understand what we 
are talking about when it comes to Open Source. Sure to be perfectly 
clear we should have said 'proprietry', but the press equate 
commercial=proprietry and the above was a press release. However there 
are a number of important points to clarify about the press release that 
you seemed to miss:

 1. GNU C has been Open Source since day one
 2. GNU C was never a proprietry compiler

I am not trying to belittle the GNU C compilers at all, just pointing 
out that they come from completely different roots. Sure GCC is *the* 
compiler for Linux and FreeBSD, but that is really only because until 
now it was the only Open Source compiler available. The FreeBSD folks 
are already excited about porting Watcom to FreeBSD and helping make it 
a better compiler.

Consider that 

> >and, with more than a million lines of source code, the Watcom
> 
> Oh, and GNUpro is about *ten* million lines of code.

Actually we underestimated the amount of code in the compiler. It is 
closer to 3 million lines of code, and that doesn't include any of the 
documentation source code (which BTW will also be Open Sourced).

But let's not get into a pissing contest about this.

Regards,