From: "John M. Aldrich" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: How could DJGPP remain the best? Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 18:40:19 -0800 Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt Lines: 35 Message-ID: <32D6FD93.3D16@cs.com> References: <5b5l0r$b3h AT nexp DOT crl DOT com> Reply-To: fighteer AT cs DOT com NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp101.cs.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Weiqi Gao wrote: > > OK, it's Friday, and I'm have free-flowing thoughts. > > One of them is this: We keep hearing that DJGPP is the best compiler > in its class. But how could that be so if the complete source code is > awailable publicly. Couldn't the people at, say, Watcom, simply > examine the code and come up with better ideas? Not according to DJGPP's license, they can't. I'm not 100% sure of this, but a great deal of DJGPP's code falls under the GNU General Public License, which does two things that would make Watcom or any commercial company quite leery of trying to steal anything: 1) It makes it illegal to use GPLed code in proprietary software. 2) It requires that the sources to any software based in any way on the GPLed code be made publicly available to anyone who uses that software. The big companies would have quite a hard time swallowing those provisions, I think. Check out the file, "COPYING" in the DJGPP docs, to read the entire GPL. BTW, so you all don't panic, this does not necessarily apply to programs written _using_ the GNU software; only programs based on or derived in any way from it. Certain of the C++ class libraries (libgpp.a) do fall under the GPL, but that can be worked around. :) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | John M. Aldrich, aka Fighteer I | fighteer AT cs DOT com | | Call me for your free AOL disk! | http://www.cs.com/fighteer | | Chain letters, work-at-home schemes, free long distance, etc., | | are ILLEGAL! Keep the Internet litter-free... don't SPAM. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------