Re: configure not happy with OpenBSD2.3

[mrs at wrs dot com (Mike Stump)]

> Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 13:20:04 -0400
> From: Ben Scherrey <scherrey@gte.net>
> To: egcs@cygnus.com

> Obviously I'm missing a significant point here so excuse the naive
> question... Why is it that egcs supports many proprietary platforms
> that provide no source code nor do they assign rights to the FSF but
> egcs does not support OpenBSD for these said reasons even though
> OpenBSD is much more "open" than these proprietary platforms? I'm a
> Linux/Solaris user myself so this doesn't affect me personally but
> I'm curious about your statement.

Support for any feature, machine, semantic, file format, userbase,
language, operating system, etc in any software is dependent upon
there being a market for such a thing and/or by the interests of the
author.

This is like saying, why doesn't anyone paint the kind of artwork I am
interested in?  Maybe your interests in artwork are just too bazaar.
:-)  Or maybe you don't pay enough.

Also, your statement isn't always true.  If you look at the ChangeLog,
you'll see people from ibm.com and arm.com donating code to make their
platforms work better.

Just because source is open or free doesn't mean anybody is going to
be interested in it or work on it.  There are quite a few people on
this list that get paid by commercial interests to support what it is
that the customers of the companies are interested in.  This is good
and healthy.  For example, my company is interested in 2 languages (C
and C++) on about 7 targets (m68k, mips, powerpc, x86, arm, i960,
sparc) on 3 platforms (HP, Solaris, win96/NT) on about one OS
(VxWorks), so if there is something in that space that doesn't work as
we'd like, I get to fix it.  No OpenBSD on the list, even though it is
free.  At home, I happen to have a Linux box, so I might through in
some Linux/x86 work from time to time.  I have a special interest in
C++, so I'll also through in some C++ work every now and then.

Ok, enough rambling for now...