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Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons
  • GNU bc is unmaintained for years. The latest version is from 2017. It don't have a repo or a mailing list.

    bc-gh started in 2018 and it is still actively developed. It is adopted by many projects I've listed in my post.

  • Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons
  • I will change it to "licensing reason". Thank you

    But the software you listed are used by many peoples. bc-gh is robust and performant, GNU bc is not actively developed, and benchmark shows that it is clearly slower than bc-gh in most case. But in most distros bc-gh is not available.

  • Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons

    (for anyone who do not know, bc is a "arbitrary-precision arithmetic language". its syntax is similar to C)

    Gavin Howard's bc (bc-gh) is adopted by busybox, toybox, FreeBSD, Android, macOS for its robustness and superior performance. It is also shipped with Gentoo Linux; LFS also use bc-gh.

    Even though bc-gh is more robust and updated, Linux distros other than Gentoo and Fedora do not package it it. bc-gh is not available on Arch (available on AUR), Debian and perhaps all of its derivative. The reason seems to be a licensing reason: bc-gh is under the BSD license.

    bc-gh is clearly superior to GNU bc, Gavin Howard's benchmark show that bc-gh is faster than GNU bc in most case, while bc-gh actually do more work than GNU bc.

    Today I tested GNU bc and bc-gh. I let they do this operation: (1024\*1024)^(1024\*1024). GNU bc give me the answer in five minutes, bc-gh give me the answer in two minutes.

    GNU bc do not have a repository. All development happen in private, and we can't make sure it is still maintained. The latest version is 1.07 from 2017. bc-gh have a public repository and it is actively maintained.

    So it is clear that other Linux distro not adopting bc-gh is purely licensing reason. They reject software not under the GPL license, even if they are more robust and more performant.

    We need a campaign to raise awareness about superior software alternatives. We need to stop Linux distro for not adopting superior and updated softwares for licensing reasons.

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    "Stable distro" meaning

    Distributions like RHEL and Debian freeze packages, you will have to use old package when the newer is available. I think these distributions is just for highly mission-critical system, they have to run software smoothly, no breakage. Most personal computer don't need that stability.

    Can anyone explain more about what a stable distributions mean?

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    scratchandgame @lemmy.ml

    My email: musicscratchgame2009@gmail.com

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