this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by scratchandgame@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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(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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[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This is not what I would consider a "political reason". A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you'll find in these repositories that aren't under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I'm sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven't thought of yet.

[–] scratchandgame@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven't given it much thought yet?

[–] scratchandgame@lemmy.ml -4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

perhaps they don't care about bc. I think they don't even notice that GNU bc haven't been updated since 2017.

[–] Takios@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 3 weeks ago

"perhaps" "I think"

In short you've got no clue.