scratchandgame

(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.

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?

People here's take about why free software ("open source") should be preferred, in my opinion (basically the OpenBSD's opinion) is flawed.

You said "open source" is "good" because it permits having eyes on ("auditing") and make sure there isn't malware.

This is NOT the most important benefit. But it is flawed because, you guys don't even have the knowledge to do coding. You guys are activist/"journalists" working for CIA. So you cannot audit the software yourselves.

Or "open source" but with a bad code style, how can you make sure the code doesn't have backdoors? But I think hilarious journalists that is only smart enough to post fake news about how down is the Russia and China economy can't even write bad code.

"open source" is good, firstly, because it permits auditing the source code and find the bugs, replace flawed/bad code with safer alternative (for example, the advantage of an open-source C software when porting to OpenBSD is they can replace every occurrence of strcat/strcpy with safer strlcat/strlcpy), sandbox it (on OpenBSD, with pledge and unveil), do privileges separation and revocation, etc.

And I think "you can make sure there isn't malware/backdoors" is the second benefit, NEVER THE FIRST.

Conclusion: Do not blindly trust what is "open source" when you can't even do code auditing.