I'll explain: [LWN.net]

I'll explain:

Posted Oct 24, 2006 20:37 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: I'll explain: by tetromino
Parent article: GPLv3: What the Hackers Said (Linux Journal)

I'd be simply fascinated to hear how your servers work without libgcc,
libstdc++, et al (approx. 2.5 million lines as of GCC 4.1, although
runtime libraries for Java, Objective C, Ada et al account for about 1.5
million of those lines).

Any way you slice it that's a significant hunk of FSF-copyrighted code.

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I'll explain:

Posted Oct 24, 2006 21:19 UTC (Tue) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

Actually, libstdc++-4.1.1 is only 24MB of uncompressed source code. The vast majority of the 256MB gcc source is the compiler itself, the java runtime, fortran, and ada junk, i.e. stuff that you probably wouldn't have installed on a server (unless you are using gcj in your webapps, of course).

I'll explain:

Posted Oct 25, 2006 7:16 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

And linux's 229MB contain 90% of junk not needed for your server as well (drivers for the things you'll never see installed on that server, filesystems not seen in the wild for years, etc).

I'll explain:

Posted Oct 25, 2006 8:13 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That's pretty much true for software in general. What do you suppose the percentage junk here is? Or here?

I'll explain:

Posted Oct 25, 2006 16:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's what my line counts corresponded to. I didn't just du the entire GCC source tree :) that would obviously give ridiculous results.