From: wbe@bbn.com (Winston Edmond)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.misc
Subject: Re: GCC, Solaris 2.0, Cygnus Support, and a lesson in corporate ethics
Date: 13 Aug 92 01:23:13
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, MA
NNTP-Posting-Host: crystal.bbn.com
In-reply-to: rfg@netcom.com's message of 6 Aug 92 18:07:39 GMT
X-Disclaimer: just my opinions and comments, not necessarily my company's

That's certainly an interesting piece of history about Cygnus, gcc, and the
port to Solaris 2.0 for SPARCs.  There are some things you didn't discuss,
though.

First, the $2000 Cygnus solicited was advertised as having two parts:
(1) (which you mentioned) it would help get gcc ported to Solaris 2.0 and
    placed on the Catalyst CD-ROM by the shipping date for Solaris 2.0, so no
    one would have to be without a C compiler;
(2) (not mentioned) it purchased one year of Cygnus's support at a price 2/3
    of the usual price for such support.

Second, part of Cygnus's appeal to potential contributors was that they were
promising a working version by a specific date -- the Solaris 2.0 ship date.
Sure, we all figured it was likely that gcc would someday be ported to
Solaris 2.0 for SPARCstations, but, in the absence of knowing with reasonable
certainty when, the trade-off is a $2000 one-time cost versus loss of
developers' time and development delays if appropriate tools aren't available
when needed.  That's easy to decide.  Had you made your porting successes
more widely known, perhaps some contributors might have chosen not to
contribute.

In the end, the one year's support and the guarantee were worth the risk that
it might all be a waste of money.  However, it's good to learn history from
the participants directly.


From: rfg@netcom.com (Ronald F. Guilmette)
>Something else that struck me as being quite humorous at the time was
>Cygnus' apparently deliberate reinforcement of the widely held belief
>(based purely on the uninformed speculation of certain unrelated netnews
>posters) that Solaris 2.0 would *not* be bundled with an assembler, a
>linker, standard libraries, or header files.  ... even though *anyone* ...
>could have easily determined ... that Solaris 2.0
>would in fact be "bundled" with an assembler, a linker, a set of standard
>libraries, and a nearly full complement of standard system include files.

Yes, it was common knowledge, posted to various newsgroups at the time, that
these *would* be in Solaris 2.0.  However, gcc doesn't use the Sun assembler,
it uses GAS, and its output had better be compatible with whatever the linker
required.  I had the impression that this was not entirely a solved problem.


>They [Cygnus] also ... broke a couple of minor things, and totally disabled 
>any possibility of using g++ on Solaris 2.0 on Sparcs.

Could you elaborate on what's broken?  Also, why would anything Cygnus did
prevent g++ from the FSF from ever working on Solaris 2.0 on SPARCs?  I would
normally assume whatever was broken would eventually get fixed.


>P.S. ...  I expect to be generally
>ostracized (with malice aforethought) from the community of GNU contributors
>(which is, in many ways now dominated by Cygnus) following (and as a result
>of) this posting.  This will of course have a negative effect upon my own
>consulting business, as I will be generally (and electronically) cut off
>from (and out of) any further development work on GNU packages.

What an odd expectation.  You really think anyone will try to keep you from
contributing your time, talent, and good work to FSF and the GNU project just
because you want to claim credit for work you did?  Wait and see, then come
back in six months and tell us if it actually happened.

On behalf of hackers, developers, and project managers everywhere, I'd like
to thank you (and everyone else that's been involved, whoever they may be)
for any and all contributions toward getting gcc to compile SPARC code for
Solaris 2.0.
 -WBE