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Date:      Thu, 20 Apr 2000 10:34:02 +0200
From:      Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Shells
Message-ID:  <20000420103402.F14732@cons.org>
In-Reply-To: <31345.955883432@zippy.cdrom.com>; from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com on Sun, Apr 16, 2000 at 04:10:32AM -0700
References:  <20000415182916.U4381@fw.wintelcom.net> <31345.955883432@zippy.cdrom.com>

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In <31345.955883432@zippy.cdrom.com>, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: 
> > Two reasons of the top of my head: GPL'd and gratuitously incompatible.
> 
> GPL'd things go into /usr/src/gnu - no big deal.  If we were overly
> squeamish about the GPL then we wouldn't have "grep" or a compiler
> toolchain either, among other things, and I doubt anybody's arguing
> for killing those.  

/bin/sh is critical for system startup and is used on almost every
FreeBSD system, even on floppy-only ones.  Many systems can live
without grep or compilers.

Consider the set of commercations applications where you would take
FreeBSD and make use of the BSD license and keep the source changes
for themself.  I don't see a point in doing so for a complete
commandline-enabled Unix clone, but I see a lot of applications that
all would ship without a compiler and could live without (or with a
minial) grep.

That raises the bar for license considerations, IMHO.

> The ash shell is just bad enough that I'd consider
> a change of license for a truly functional shell out-of-the-box to
> be a more than acceptable trade-off.
> 
> As to the second argument, you'll have to explain yourself, sonny. :)

It's no question that bash2 is better than our ash, but with regards
for "is just bad enough" I can only ask you to report the problems you
have (in doubt directly to me).

I also have some sh fixes in the queue.

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany     http://www.bsdhh.org/




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