Re: What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus / Red Hat?

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at>]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Tom Lord wrote:
> There's no obvious good guys or bad guys in that history -- but it's
> _interesting_.  It was a major development in the history of free
> software.  It's important -- and from an outsider perspective, I'd
> guess that everyone involved is now sufficiently distant from the
> events to look at them pretty objectively.
> [...]
> And in "./EGCS-history" -- how about a paragraph or two from the
> various people who were involved in egcs and the formation of the
> steering commitee.   A first hand account from a slightly removed
> perspective.   I'd give 40% odds that future historians will thank you
> for your forsight.   Please consider inviting RMS to contribute a
> section, if you go this route.

I fully agree that a historical description of the history of gcc/EGCS/GCC
would be very interesting from several points of view, but I'm afraid it's
quite hard to do that well (from a scientific point of view):

There aren't too many who have in-depth knowledge of the gcc 2 era, and of
those I suppose many will have a very subjective perspective.  Some of the
relevant information is not public (the old gcc2 list, private mails before
the formation of egcs, egcs and GCC SC mails, especially discussions with
RMS) and providing a fair historical overview will be highly non-trivial
(and even then it's not clear whether it will be accepted for inclusion in
official GCC documention by all affected parties).

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry"   pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at   http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/