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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week 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?

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

"perhaps" "I think"

In short you've got no clue.