Re: An article about the Cygnus tree

[Joe Buck <jbuck at racerx dot synopsys dot com>]

> OK, I checked this in:

> ! was a public project and competed with FSF's gcc project. Finally, in spring
> ! 1999 FSF closed their gcc project and EGCS was renamed into GCC.

Still wrong.  The FSF never "closed their gcc project".  This *is* the gcc
project.  Same people for the most part, same code base.  We were always
careful with egcs to do things in a way that would prevent a permanent
fork.  What we were doing, in essence, was to demonstrate to the FSF that
there was a better way of doing things.  It is difficult to do these
things without offending people; there were some very sensitive politics
involved.  But the end result has been a great success.

What happened in April 1999 was that the 2.8.x and egcs lines of
development were merged and the egcs maintainers were given charge of the
whole project.  The current way of working is more in line with FSF
principles than what we had before (restricting who can get snapshots
seems at least to violate the spirit of the GPL, even if it is technically
allowed).

> BTW, what did EGCS stand for?

eggs.  (hence the logo).  Actually there were several suggested meanings
for the "E": "experimental" was the most common one, and it was presented
to RMS as an experiment.  He was kept informed and gave his sometimes
grudging approval for the major decisions.