On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Stéphane Rollandin lecteur@zogotounga.net wrote:
Keep in mind that while programming languages have been largely "commoditized" the best implementations of many languages still cost money. E.g. you want the best C compiler? It's not GCC. Buy the Intel compiler and watch your code run twice as fast.
wrong, according to the people there (from google "icc vs gcc", first results page): http://blog.alphagemini.org/2008/03/icc-vs-gcc-43.html http://www.osnews.com/comments/19462
business is business, quality is quality, saying business => quality is an ideological statement that needs yet to be proven. IMHO :)
Stef
Um...... Did you actually read the links you posted? In the first one, the ICC bar (program run time) is *less then* half the size of the gcc one and the blogger mentions that GCC has a long way to go at the end of the article!
Look, I'm as glad that there is free software out there for me to use and learn from as the next guy (and I even contribute with a "libre"-free license). But there is absolutely nothing wrong with people who sell software. They make a strategic choice. Companies like RedHat choose to use a software product as a loss leader to drum up dollars for their support infrastructure. Places like Cinicom chose to forgo the potentially risky loss leader strategy. If someone thinks one of these strategies is some kind of "guiding light" and the other is morally bankrupt then that person is, in the best case, incredibly naive.