Why not GNU cmp?

[Unga]

--- On Thu, 9/25/08, Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> From: Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org>
> Subject: Re: Why not GNU cmp?
> To: unga888 at yahoo.com
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Date: Thursday, September 25, 2008, 3:34 PM
> Unga wrote:
> 
> > In my past experience, the GNU ncurses and Flex
> (http://flex.sourceforge.net/) are simple not compatible
> with FreeBSD even though Flex is licensed under BSD. I
> wanted to know whether the GNU cmp is also the same fate
> other than the license because all these GNU tools comes in
> one package, Diffutils.
> 
> Both simply are compatible with FreeBSD.
> 
Kris, thanks for confirming both GNU cmp and FreeBSD cmp are compatible with FreeBSD.

I wish FreeBSD guys can finalize the "Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD" soon.


> > I was wondering why FreeBSD wrote their own version of
> cmp. If it just the license, then that's fine. I prefer
> the BSD versions of diff, etc. when available. 
> 
> You are asking the wrong questions: why did GNU write their
> own version 
> of cmp?  FreeBSD's dates to 1987.
> 
Oops, I didn't know GNU restricted the **truely free** cmp and sugar-coated it as "Free" :)

Best regards
Unga