Re: Standard header format.

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

"Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@globalsymmetry.com> writes:

> >1. They work part-time and for free, so, nothing can be imposed upon
> > them.
> 
> I don't know the whole picture, or who is or isn't getting paid.  IBM 
> supposedly put $1,000,000,000 behind Linux, and open source.  Where did it 
> all go? Advertising? I'm certainly not getting paid for what I've been doing.

IBM money's went to a lot of different places, including advertising,
support for various server capabilities, Eclipse, and, of course,
stealing code from SCO and inserting it into Linux.  I expect that
most of that billion dollars was actually spent within IBM.

Not very much of it trickled down to the comparatively small
subcategory of libstdc++.  There are probably some IBM programmers who
look at libstdc++ from time to time, but the only name I see regularly
in ChangeLog is Ulrich Weigand (and I don't know whether this is paid
or unpaid work).

There are a few people paid to work on libstdc++ at Red Hat and
S.U.S.E. (now part of Novell).  Those people do a significant number
of the routine changes, perhaps a majority of them.  They also do much
of the release management.  There may be some people at other
organizations paid to work on libstdc++; I don't really know.

Many of the people who contribute to libstdc++ do so on their own
time.  This includes many of the people who comment on patches and
help set library direction.

In fact, none of this really matters.  If you want the library to
change, you must convince people that you are right and that they are
wrong.  By my reading, you have only real argument, which is for
clarity.  Your other arguments are arguments from authority, but the
authorities on this mailing list are good too.  I haven't seen you
make any serious attempt to produce counter-arguments to what other
people are saying, except to assert that you are right.

There is one other way to change the library, which is to do the work
yourself, or to pay other people to do the work.

Ian