> Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc" from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs).
The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX schedule from 1989 ( http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm ) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software.
Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... .) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became "Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases."
Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun), who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html ).
Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3) xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.
Whether or not gcc was "obscure" in 1990 really depends on which circles you were in, I'm sure, but it's true that it was hardly an unknown project, and that Sun's decision to unbundle the C compiler helped it to become much more popular.
Also missing from the article was a nod to Cygnus Support. A lot of the engineering work for gcc was done by the engineers at Cygnus, who basically collected support fees that were substantially cheaper than the Sun Pro C compiler. To be fair, I doubt Sun at that era had anticipated the rise of the "sell support and custom engineering for free software" business model. Cygnus was one of the first companies who was able to show that it was in fact workable.
> In 1990 I became Executive Director of the Sun User Group. That December I headed for San Jose for SUG's Eighth Annual Conference and Exhibit. ... The second group was irate because Sun had "unbundled" its software. That is, rather than getting all of Sun's developer tools together, they had to be purchased separately. And of course, they cost more this way.
> But wait. Why purchase the C compiler from Sun, when you could get a better one for less money from the FSF? That's what a large number of Sun's users asked themselves. And the net result was a real jump in CD sales at the FSF. (Several years later, when I organized the Freely Redistributable Software Conference [February 1996] and then was Vice President of the FSF, I realized more fully just how much Sun had benefited the FSF. I'm certain this was not a foreseen consequence.)
I think that something a "large number of ... users" know about cannot meaningfully be called "obscure", else my lack of knowledge about European football/soccer teams makes it an obscure sport.
It looks like there were two stages to unbundling. The first was to add a new, better, unbundled compiler, and the second was to remove the base one. These seem to have taken place in 1990 and 1992, respective.
> In addition, Sun introduced a new product, Sun C 1.0 -- its first compiler sold separately from SunOS ... A version of the C compiler will continue to be bundled and supported with SunOS but feature enhancements will be made to to the unbundled version only.
Then for the second stage, according to Sun Technical Bulletin July 1992 ftp://ftp.math.ethz.ch/hg/pub/doc/stb/stbjul92.ps :
> Sun does not plan to “bundle” any compiler with the Solaris 2.0 operating
system. The C compiler, which has traditionally been included as part of the
Sun operating system, will be sold as a separate unbundled product.
That Wikipedia page says Solaris 2 came out on June 1992, not 1991 as you wrote.
> In 1994, Sun and Lucid agreed to rename Lucid Emacs to XEmacs (a name not favorable to either company); the first release called XEmacs was version 19.11. In June 1994, Lucid folded and Jamie quit to work for the newly formed Mosaic Communications Corp.,
The first version named XEmacs was in September 13, 1994, so still a couple of years after the C compiler was fully unbundled.
My three points remain correct, with the replacement of "1991", "1992", and "1993" in the place of "1990."
How does that affect anything? Unbundling doesn't depend on changing the compiler. I don't see how the business model is affected by ANSI standardization. How would things have been different if C were standardized in 1984 instead?
I don't understand how it makes a difference. Unbundling is a sales strategy. They could have unbundled even without changing the compiler at all.
In any case, the literature I read (see earlier links) included discussion about improved optimizations, so even without ANSI there was a differentiation between the new unbundled compiler and the old bundled one.
Why do you think it's anything more than a coincidence?
> Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc" from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs).
The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX schedule from 1989 ( http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm ) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software.
Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht... .) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became "Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases."
Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun), who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''" (http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html ).
Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3) xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.