[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil GCC-2.96

[Steve Baker]

cbbrowne at ntlug.org wrote:

> In effect, RHAT was unwilling to wait for 3.0, and so "forked" their own
> version.  How reprehensible that was is a matter of "point of view."  The
> touchstone question really is:
>   "Do you think they did this because of customer demand, or in order
>    to set their distributions apart from other distributions?"
> 
> If it truly was customer demand, the "evil" is pretty banal.  If the
> reasons for the fork were more sinister, then it's rather more evil.
> It's hard to extract peoples' thoughts, so you'll have to judge this
> one for yourself...

What is EVIL about it is this:

  Suppose, as an OpenSource developer, I write some code - it's not finished
  yet but *someone* decides to release it on their distro against my protests.

  Now what happens?

    1) Three quarters of a million people take the half-assed broken version of my
       code ... and perhaps find some problem with it (I'm guessing about how
       many copies RedHat sell - so scale these numbers to fit your beliefs).

    2) Because they bought it for actual $$$ and "know" that the
       distributor has a certain reputation for quality, end-users naturally
       assume that this is a good version of the code.  That's one of the
       main reasons we pay for distributions after all.

    3) Hence, a quarter million people email me with questions about
       a chunk of software that "never existed" as far as I'm concerned.
       I'm completely *FLOODED* with support requests.  Most of them won't
       mention the exact version number of the software they are running
       so I can't filter valid problems with 'official' releases from the junk.

    4) The other quarter million say "That guy Steve *sucks* - he shipped
       crappy code without even properly testing it."

    5) The remaining quarter million grumble that this is just typical
       of this OpenSource crap and give up on Linux forever.

Very few of those end users are going to suspect the distro vendor much
less drown *him* in support requests.

Bear in mind that I'm giving this code away for nothing (except perhaps to
enhance my reputation and have my ego massaged) and I have to answer all
those support questions in my spare time.

*THAT'S* why it's EVIL.  It's not illegal - the intermediate versions
of GPL'ed code are still GPL'ed no matter how half-finished they are.
However, it *is* highly unethical and violently contrary to the 'hacker
code'.

The only solution (AFAIK) is to keep one's CVS repository closed to
anonymous checkout and swear co-authors' to secrecy.  That sucks -
and wouldn't have worked in this case because Cygwin is owned by RedHat
and Cygwin is in control of the CVS repository for GCC.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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