[Info-vax] CPython has removed OpenVMS support

[Simon Clubley]

On 2013-12-22, Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 12/21/13, 5:34 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> BTW, is that a purely third party maintained port, or has VMS support
>> been added back into the mainline Perl codebase ?
>
> It's not an either/or question. I'm the third party, but I have a commit
> bit and the port has been maintained continuously as part of the
> mainline distribution for a couple of decades. According to Ohloh.net
> (<http://www.ohloh.net/p/perl/contributors/19391777492879>), I've
> contributed 121 changes this year and 5,160 in the thirteen years I've
> been involved. That's what I mean by the opposite of drive-by porting.
>

[Thanks for the detailed response, BTW.]

In this case, given what you have said above, I would not regard you as a
third party, but as part of the mainline development team for Perl.

As well as your HP examples, a good example of a third party port is what
Microchip did with the PIC24 and PIC32 toolchains.

They took the gcc/binutils code, added PIC24 and PIC32 support and then
didn't contribute back their work to the mainline gcc code. This meant
Microchip continued to maintain a seperate, increasingly stale, branch
of gcc and did the minimum required by the GPL to make the source code
for that branch available for general download.

That's the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote "third party"
above.

[BTW, it's also a good example of why the GPL is better than the BSD
licenses in cases like this. If the gcc code was BSD license based,
then Microchip, who clearly do not have a open source mindset, could
have just close-sourced their additions to gcc, and we would not have
had _anything_ open source from Microchip's work for the PIC24/PIC32.]

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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