Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[Ronald Cole <ronald@devo.ridgecrest.ca.us>]

les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> In article <dewar.871738278@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
> >As has been explained before, and as I think most people except Ronald
> >Cole perfectly well understand, the situation is as follows.
> >We ask people receiving wavefront versions to refrain from distributing
> >them, because it is actively unhelpful to the GNAT project and to the
> >development and use of GNAT (both by customers and by unsupported users)
> >to have versions floating around that have not gone through the kind of
> >field testing that we insist on for public release.
> 
> Do you imagine the popularity of Linux to have been damaged by the
> simultaneous releases of 2.0.x (stable-track) and 2.1.x (development)
> kernels?  I'd say the opposite is true even though a few newbies
> are confused.  Why worry about the people who don't bother to read
> the disclaimers?

Amen!  Also note that the public release of 3.09 appears to be a
public release that has "not gone through the kind of field testing
that we insist on for public release."  The gcc-272.dif released
with the source distribution contains a patch that introduces an
optimizer bug that was apparently made just one day before being
released.

Of course, one might interpret this fact to demonstrate just exactly
what kind of field testing ACT insists on for public releases.

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