Re: GDB is the GNU project's native debugger

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian@wasabisystems.com>]

"Dave Korn" <dk@artimi.com> writes:

>   To my understanding, and correct me if you feel I've misunderstood, a major
> part of the purpose of the GNU project is to encourage and evangelise the spread
> of open source, and the strategic method for achieving that goal is to provide
> free software, in particular a free toolchain, across as wide a range of
> platforms as possible, and in particular the reason for the existence of the
> LGPL exception is to enable the GNU toolchain and software family to be ported
> to proprietary systems and to make inroads for open software there and convince
> users of proprietary systems of the value and benefits that can be obtained from
> the open source philosophy.

For what it's worth, I believe that is to some degree a
misunderstanding.  The goal of the FSF is a completely free system
(this goal has been achieved).  This free system is intended to be
superior both technically and philosophically, and thus encourage
people to switch to it.

Running free tools on non-free systems is interesting only to the
extent that it helps lead to a fully free system.  This happens
because it encourages a broader range of people to put resources into
improving the free tools, and thus improving the free system.

However, running free tools on non-free systems is counterproductive
to the extent that they make the non-free systems more usable, and
thus delay the adoption of completely free systems.

Using the free tools as advertisements of the effectiveness of the GNU
project is not actually a goal of the FSF, contrary to what you
suggest.

The fact that the GNU tools have become highly portable across a broad
range of systems is largely the result of the resources that have been
into them for business reasons, starting in the early days of Cygnus
and continuing in various successor companies.  Especially in the
early days, this work was sometimes done over the objections of the
FSF.

The LGPL in particular was an effort driven initially largely by
Cygnus (although Cygnus later found it to be unhelpful), and the LGPL
has since been largely disavowed by the FSF:
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

All of the above is of course my beliefs based on what I saw as it
happened, and do not represent any sort of official position by
anybody.

Ian