Re: Free UNIX for non-commerical use.

From: Dr. David Kirkby (drkirkby_at_ntlworld.com)
Date: 07/29/03

  • Next message: John Santos: "Re: RL02 assistance...." 
    Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 02:59:27 +0100

    Uli Link wrote:
    >
    > > 1) In the case of games manufacturers, they would indeed loose revenue
    > > if they allowed everyone to copy their games. I don't think this is so
    > > with UNIX operating systems and compilers. There are not than many
    > > home users going to pay more than $1000 on a compiler. They will
    > > likely use gcc instead and have to accept the poorer performance.
    >
    > Don't agree: the optimization of the GCC has become much better:
    > in 9 out of 10 times the GCC produces faster binaries than vendor compilers

    That's not been my experience on SPARC.

    > GCC's results were up to 10% faster on PowerPC, with greater difference for
    > float compared to integer.

    I've not tried gcc on AIX - only the IBM compiler. But the IBM
    debugger is *very* good - far better than gdb, even if you use the ddd
    GUI front end to gdb.

    Even with -Wall, gcc does not seem to issue some of the compiler
    warnings of the commercial compiers - sometimes these warnings have
    been helpful and allowed me to remove bugs.

    I've been sufficiently impressed with Sun's tools to buy my own copies
    - at discounted prices I must admit. I could not justify buying them
    at full commerical prices for home use.

    > The tools from Sun are much more comfortable but tend to bring elder
    > machines to the knees.

    That's probably true if you run the GUI front end, but dbx can be run
    at the command line.
     
    > > > But I'm all for student discounts/freebies and hobby licenses. There
    > > > should be a way of registering yourself as a hobby/student user imo
    > > > and be able to have the software legally for non-commercial use.
    > >
    > > Yes agreed.
    > >
    > Me too.
    >
    Me too. 

    -- 
Dr. David Kirkby,
Senior Research Fellow,
Department of Medical Physics,
University College London,
11-20 Capper St, London, WC1E 6JA.
Tel: 020 7679 6408 Fax: 020 7679 6269
Internal telephone: ext 46408
e-mail davek@medphys.ucl.ac.uk
  • Next message: John Santos: "Re: RL02 assistance...."

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