C Code mutilation by using gcc-3.3.x

[Kai Henningsen]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)  wrote on 13.02.04 in <402CAEFA.6010207@gnat.com>:

> Kai Henningsen wrote:
>
> >> in a project
> >>which has
> >>
> >>	Open Source
> >>
> >>as its main goal.
> >
> >
> > Does anyone think there is anything else to this that this guy's utter
> > cluelessness to what "unnamed and anonymous structs and unions" actually
> > are? It sure sounds to me like he's just going off on the name of the
> > features without even the slightest idea about what the features actually
> > are. Why else would he put that in the same pot as binary only modules? I
> > sure can't see any *actual* connection here.
>
> Not to mention the provocative claim that GNU has "open source" as its
> main goal :-)

Now with that one I can't find fault. Unless you wish to also claim that  
the GNU project does not have "free software" as its main goal, of course;  
I suppose there are ways to argue that one.

If, however, you don't want to argue that particular thing, then as on  
purely licence-technical grounds, pretty much every piece of free software  
qualifies as open source and the other way around, I don't see how you can  
possibly dispute the point you want to dispute.

What you might claim is that the motivation behind the two labels is  
different, of course. I'm not even certain of that, but that's certainly  
where the main battleground in this ridiculous ideological war is.

>From where I sit, apart from the infighting itself, neither side does  
anything the other side ought to have a problem with - and in fact, there  
seem to be quite a number of people who seem to have no problem counting  
themselves as members of both crowds, including myself ... and,  
incidentally, including whoever made the GPC ("part of GCC") homepage. A  
short excerpt from the start of http://gnu-pascal.org/:

        Welcome to the WWW home site of GNU Pascal,
        the free 32/64-bit Pascal compiler!

        Copyright  1987-2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

        GNU Pascal is Free Software (Open-Source Software). You are
        welcome to redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the
        GNU General Public License; see GNU for details.

With the terms in question linking to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- 
sw.html and http://www.opensource.org/, respectively.

MfG Kai