What was more frustrating to Sun users was that there WAS a compiler
included in Sun OS,
but it went away with Solaris.  I saw a noticeable change in code available
in binary form only after that.
At least until the GNU stuff got stable enough to use...

(I was a customer of MIke's when he first start Cygnus for support of the
GNU compilers...
I was working in a secured facility and multiple times I spoke with him on
the phone typing in patches
by hand -- as he relayed them -- because of the time and hassle it took to
get a tape in with the patch...)

Earl


On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 11:45 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 12:22:56PM -0800, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > At the times I referred to the lack of freely available AT&T source code
> > was extremely limiting in how people viewed the availability of such
> > "add-on" tools for Unix -- including the C compiler!
>
> This wasn't just an AT&T thing, Sun and SGI and everyone charged for their
> C compiler.  I sort of get it, writing a good compiler is up there with
> writing a good kernel in effort, not quite the same, but probably the
> 2nd hardest thing to do.  So the compiler people cost a lot, companies
> wanted to get that cost back.
>
> It was stupid.  Having a free compiler meant that more people would
> write apps for your platform.   It should have been a loss leader.
>
> > > For folks running binary only systems from Masscomp/Sun/DEC/HP/IBM and
> the
> > > like, it is possible it was different.
> >
> > It was _very_ different.
> >
> > If you weren't out in the trenches of end-user Unix-based systems at the
> > time it may not have been as obvious as to just how restrictive it was
> > to have proprietary fee-based licensing of such add-on software.  Most
> > end-users couldn't even pay their vendors for ditroff -- their vendors
> > didn't want to have to license it from AT&T, even when they had
> > advocates inside the companies (e.g. I did some work supporting software
> > for a couple such vendors and was never able to convince them).  Some,
> > as you mention, were all-in, but it wasn't until UNIX System V Release 4
> > became more widely available that systems based on it were more likely
> > to have ditroff, and sometimes (though much more rarely) the "new" dpost
> > post-processor was also included.  I don't know if there were different
> > licensing terms for SysVr4 or not.  Don't get me started on how hard it
> > also was to get some end users to buy a C compiler too.
>
> Yep, lived through this as well.  I fought with Sun to make more stuff
> free for developers, it just didn't make sense to not do that but the
> powers that were didn't get it.
>
> One thing that Sun did do, probably in spite of itself, was fund
> Michael Tiemann's work on C++.  He worked out some deal that that
> work would be open source and he pretty much made GNU C++ work
> for some definition of work (C++ is a mess).
>
>