Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Ian Lance Taylor]

kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) writes:

>     I made a serious (with tongue a tad in cheek) set of suggestions 
>     specific to GCC, and in response to comments made herein by others. 
>     There is a sincere need to address these issues, which are very 
>     GCC-specific; few other packages have the breadth and depth of GCC, 
>     across platforms and users. Therefore, this seems to be an appropriate 
>     venue.
> 
> You are totally ignoring the fact that there are many people who *are* paying
> to have GCC maintained and a number of companies very happy to receive
> such payments.  But the point remains that the issues you are raising are
> financial and political and this is a *technical* list.

I can't agree.  gcc is a consortium of commercial companies working
together on a single open source code base.  But it is also a
volunteer project supported by the Free Software Foundation for the
advancement of free software.  What Scott is talking about is how to
balance the needs of the free software community and the needs of the
commercial interests.  This is an important issue for the gcc project
as a whole.  The gcc mailing list is the correct place to discuss it.

A discussion of the general issue would indeed be off-topic for the
gcc mailing list.  But a discussion of the issue in the specific
context of gcc is on-topic.

Ian