Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!sunic!uupsi!rpi!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!hoptoad!gnu
From: g...@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: ba.seminars,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Mike Tiemann on free software market, Stanford EE380, Wed 4:15 Skilling
Message-ID: <12874@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 17 Oct 90 00:43:39 GMT
Organization: Cygnus Support, Palo Alto
Lines: 87
Posted: Wed Oct 17 01:43:39 1990

Mike Tiemann of Cygnus Support will present an hour's talk as part
of the Stanford Computer Systems Lab Colloquium series, at 4:15PM
Wednesday, 17 Oct 1990, in Skilling Auditorum on the Stanford campus.
Be there or be proprietary!


			     GNU Software

			    Cygnus Support

				 -or-

				 What
		    Sun/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Lotus/etc
			Don't Want You To Know
				About
			    Free Software

Free software is going to fundamentally change the way the software
industry works.  The dominant force in software today comes from
"proprietary software".  Under this model, users pay money for the
right to use a collection of bits in very limited ways: they can copy
the bits from a specific piece of media to memory and execute them,
but they cannot copy them from one piece of media to another without
paying more money.  They can use the bits as they were programmed to
behave, but they cannot extend that behavior to suit their needs--even
when it means fixing a bug in the bits.  Finally, when to users of
these bits wants to exchange information about these bits, including
the bits themselves, the company licensing the use of the bits may ask
for additional money before any further discussion between these two
users may take place.

The free software model is completely different.  First, the only
distribution restriction placed on free software is that
redistribution cannot be restricted.  Second, users have the freedom
to use, distribute, or modify as they see fit.  Finally, there is no
claim made to aspects of the bits such as "Look and Feel",
"Intellectual Property", etc.  Only traditional copyright law is used,
and only to protect the free redistributability of the bits.

Over the past five years, free software has come of age.  In that
period of time, significant software packages, GNU Emacs, BSD TCP/IP,
GNU C and C++, X Windows, netnews, TeX, and many UNIX utilities (such
as awk, tar, grep and more) have been implemented as free software.
Cygnus Support has made the business decision to focus on supporting
only free software.  We expect the free software market to be worth at
least $100M within five years.

This talk will explain the ideas behind free software, compare the
progress of free software against other software development models,
and present the current state of free software today.  It will discuss
the business opportunities available to free software providers and
free software users.  The speaker will be free for discussion at the
conclusion of this presentation.

	---

Michael Tiemann started writing free software in 1987 while working
for MCC in Austin TX.  He wrote the GNU C++ compiler and GDB+
debugger, the first released native-code C++ compiler and the first
released C++ source-language debugger, respectively.  During that
time, he also ported the GNU C compiler to the ns32k, m88k, and Sun
SPARC processors.

He was invited to work at INRIA (French National Institute of Computer
Science) in Roquencourt to continue working on GNU C++, adding
features for object migration and dynamic linking.  While in France,
he also ported GNU C++ and GDB+ to the Sun SPARC.

Returning from France, he enrolled as a graduate student at Stanford
University, working with Mark Linton on the InterViews project.  GNU
C++ became part of the standard InterViews release during that year.
He added support for multiple inheritance and other C++ 2.0 features
to GNU C++ early in 1989, and wrote a machine-independent instruction
scheduler for the GNU compilers in the spring.  He joined the Advanced
Unix Development project at Sun Microsystems, adding exception
handling and other experimental features throughout the summer.

Since early 1990 he has co-founded Cygnus Support as its first President
and chief compiler wizard.

Michael was born in Schenectady, New York in 1964.  He attended
Phillips Academy, Andover, and received his undergraduate degree at
the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania.
-- 
John Gilmore      {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu        g...@toad.com
Just say no to thugs.  The ones who lock up innocent drug users come to mind.