We need an RMS, a Linus, or Tridge or Alan or ...

We need an RMS, a Linus, or Tridge or Alan or ...

We, the free software community, need to find a Linus, or Tridge or Alan Cox or someone with those considerable talents who also develops the passion to make something nurture something like sparse, or smatch or any of those to maturity.

Also I see Coverity as a picture perfect case of the pressures on the FSF to devise a new version of the GPL. Coverity has apparently followed the letter of the law in their use of gcc to create their xgcc/MetaL static checker. By providing only a service they are never obligated to release their work even though they benefit, extensively and commercially, from the derivation ... from all the work that GCC creators and maintainers have poured into the base software for over a decade.

(This is not to slight Coverity. They have poured their own sweat and tears into their product for a few years --- and they've complied with the license so far as I know. They have a need to make their money, too. But clearly the world will be a better place when we all have access to a top notch static testing tool. I wish I could say that people would use saner languages like Python and Perl for most of their work --- but they won't and we'll need a core of C for the foreseeable future).

JimD

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