Re: info

["Martin v. Loewis" <martin at loewis dot home dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

> my question is this, if you give away your source code isn't it possible
> that your competitors could see what you are doing?

Yes, that's entirely possible. However, if they derive work from GCC,
they have to follow the General Public License (GPL); see COPYING for
details.

> i know i am not a political person i am just a programmer, but how
> does that work?

Well, I'm not sure what your concern is. People contributing to GCC
know that they won't be payed for their contributions per se (although
some still make a living out of it).

> sorry for being o.t. it just seemed like a lot of you make a living off
> opensource code and working with companys that do not offer an ipo.

I personally don't make a living out of free software; I have other
sources of funding.

> do people pay you to write software code?

Some are payed to do so, yes.

> isn't that what the company's employess are for?

Well, companies *do* pay employees to develop GCC; most notably
Cygnus/RedHat and CodeSourcery are such companies. Sometimes the
companies donate code for GCC, sometimes employees work on GCC in
their spare time as well.

> like my sister gets paid 44,000 us dollars every year to write manuals for
> adobe photoshop 5.0 ("technical writer") _EVEN_ though there is already
> awsome one in the online help in most of the works she writes about. she
> told me that the people that work with at the company are too arrogant to so
> and "look for online help". is this true?

I can imagine that there are people that don't know how to read online
help, and need a printed book instead. Likewise, there are people that
*never* read a printed book, and expect online help all the time. And
then there are people that don't read documentation at all, and expect
to understand every program without documentation.

Regards,
Martin