Re: New Software License idea: "The Freedom License."

[Drazen Kacar]

Karen Hill wrote:
>  Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> > Care to quote line and verse of POSIX?  [...]
> 
>  WRONG!  You must follow the standard to a tee if you want to be
>  compliant.  Otherwise you are extending, just like Microsoft does.

There is nothing wrong with extending, provided that you don't break the
interoperability with the standard. (And sometimes even that can be
justified. Rarely, but it happens.)

>  Remember what MS did to its version of the JVM?  That's right they
>  added Microsoft extentions to the JVM and when app writers used those
>  extensions, they were not portable to other OSes.

And Solaris (just like Linux, just like any other Unixish system) has
many features, which, if you use them, make your program non-portable to
other operating systems. And you have to use them because there is no
standard which specifies how to do those things in a portable way.

I'm talking about very ordinary things. For example, whenever you create
a shared library you're using non-standard procedure, because "the
standard procedure" just doesn't exist.

>  Would you call Microsoft's "Managed C++" standard C++?

I don't know anything about Microsoft's C++ implementations. However...

Would you call Sun's C++ compiler in the default mode standard C++?
Would you call g++ in the default mode standard C++? I would not.

But those compilers have a mode in which they try to be standard
compliant (I don't know if they have everything implemented, though).

>  I would not because it follows and then extends the ISO C++ standards
>  as to work with the .NET framework.

How do you think standards are written? If nobody ever implemented
things outside of the standard, all standardization processes would be
"design by a committee" in the bad meaning of the phrase. There has to
be some experience in the real world before something is chosen as a
good enough feature for the standard.

>  Another way to think of this is why not include a LISP interpreter in
>  gmake?  It would be a "feature" in your world.

It would, provided that it doesn't interfere with the POSIX requirements
on the make utility.

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