Two visions for the future of sourceware.org

Posted Sep 22, 2022 9:01 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Two visions for the future of sourceware.org by pbonzini
Parent article: Two visions for the future of sourceware.org

And it was not a hostile fork either. They took pains to assign copyrights to the FSF, etc, with the idea that the egcs code would be merged into what was then gcc2. Of course, what happened was that the FSF abandoned gcc2 and blessed egcs as the new official GCC.

Two visions for the future of sourceware.org

Posted Sep 22, 2022 19:51 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

egcs had to be created because FSF gcc had completely broken in the late 90s; it was unable to produce releases for a period of about two years, and forks were exploding all over the place. Merging back into gcc2 wasn't really possible because gcc2 had been using a flow where only one overworked guy (whose main focus was elsewhere) did all the checkins, and it had a badly broken C++ that was mainly good for internal compiler errors.

So it was about either having gcc accepted as gcc3, and having egcs people manage gcc in the egcs way, or staying independent. But the disputes were not about free software philosophy (at least, 95% was not), it was about how to manage a large free software project.

For those of us not working for Cygnus, it was also about not having the only usable g++ become effectively proprietary, which some of the Cygnus marketing people were trying to do (sure, it would be GPL, but their idea was that you could only get it from Cygnus and they would strongly discourage sharing by whatever legal means the could come up with). We wanted the good code to be available easily to all, not just to Cygnus customers. This eventually was a big selling point that convinced RMS.