[vbox-dev] Unhappy with recent developments

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Frank Mehnert <frank.mehnert at oracle.com>wrote:

> 1. Reduced freedom (moving BIOS from bcc to non-free Watcom compiler),
> > which creates problems for the Debian GNU/Linux project
>
> And I'm unhappy with you ignoring my explanations in the corresponding
> Debian bugreport.
>

I'm curious, why move from bcc (ancient, unmaintained for ages) to Watcom
(which looked to me barely maintained and developed) instead of something
more modern like gcc, clang, etc? I guess Watcom has some unique features
that make it more fit for BIOS' compilation, but other than having read
Watcom was used in the past for embedded because it generated small code, I
cannot think of anything.

(and please let's not make this a licenses, freedom, etc discussion: I'm
asking a purely technical question)

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
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