[ On Monday, November 10, 2003 at 11:30:54 (-0800), Phil Nelson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: bc and dc revisited.
>
> Again, I'd like to know why it is so important to have the GPL removed from 
> all the tools?    I understand the kernel and fully support it.    

Personally I strongly agree with getting rid of GPL utilities too,
provided the most glaring performance problems and bugs in the
non-GPL replacements are fixed.  (I long ago dumped GNU AWK, GNU TAR,
and GNU Grep from my systems ;-)

It's not so much a matter of politics or licensing that bothers me, as
much as it is the unnecessary bloat (and poor internals style) of most
GPL'ed software that bothers me.

If you need/want GNU tools then you know where to find them (e.g. pkgsrc! :-)

I'd be more than happy if NetBSD provided only basic POSIX functionality
and features in the base-OS utilities, though I have no argument against
features with true utilitarian value which have not yet made it into
POSIX, such as the context options in grep et al.

(i.e. I'd be more than happy if there were NO support whatsoever for
those most ugly GNU "long" options!)

It would be nice to eliminate GCC-isms in code too, particularly from
public header files, though that's much more of a blue-sky dream for now.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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