Software Free

Jakub Jelinek announced the availability of GCC 4.3.1 saying, "GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds the standard tag, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.3.1 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

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"GCC 4.3.1 has been released. GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases..."

Encoding is a CPU-intensive operation. Whilst encoding, using optimised code is crucial. In this short article I will explain how I gained a 300% speed boost when encoding DVDs and will show how having the program’s sources and being able to talk to the maintainers sometimes really, really helps. Welcome to doing things “the GNU/Linux way”.

RMS: «If Microsoft says that ['era of open computing'], it appears to be an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy. If people believe it, they may make it come true. The way to deal with that is to refuse to let Microsoft lead you. Pay attention to your freedom instead of self-serving forecasts ...

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Joseph Myers announced the availability of GCC 4.2.4 saying, "GCC 4.2.4 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.2.4 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

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Joseph Myers announced the availability of GCC 4.2.4 saying, "GCC 4.2.4 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.2.4 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

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## In this issue
* Free Software Supporter exclusive: WBUR is streaming Ogg Vorbis!
* DBD Action Alert - Libraries: Eliminate DRM!
* Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0
* Get your next machine with gNewSense
* Silicon Mechanics to ship servers with free BIOS preinstalled
* Can we rescue OLPC from Windows? by Richard M. Stallman
* End Software Patents: the Bilski hearing, heard.

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"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."

Joseph Myers announced the availability of GCC 4.2.3 saying, "GCC 4.2.3 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.2 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.2.3 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

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"Mr. Stallman, creator of the GPL, FSF and GCC, shares his thoughts on a number of topics..."

"'Const' has *never* been about the thing not being modified. Forget all that claptrap. C does not have such a notion," began Linus Torvalds, responding to a query about why kfree() takes a const pointer. He continued, "'const' is a pointer type issue, and is meant to make certain mis-uses more visible at compile time. It has *no* other meaning, and anybody who thinks it has is just setting himself up for problems." He offered two explanations, beginning with simple C semantics, "from a very obvious and very *real* caller perspective, 'free()' really doesn't change the thing the pointer points to. It does something totally different: it makes the *pointer* itself invalid." He then added his second reason, "anything that *can* take a const pointer should always do so. Why? Because we want the types to be as tight as possible, and normal code should need as few casts as possible." When it was pointed out that GCC 4.2 displays warnings when casting a const pointer to a non-const, Linus replied:

"Welcome to the new year and another monthly installment of news about the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. This month we have news from the FSF Europe, the latest numbers on GPLv3 conversions, the annual Gfortran report from the GCC folks, a GLib development release, Stallman commenting on the GNOME's alleged support of OOXML, GNU Hurd news, and more..."

An earlier discussion about GCC compiler misoptimizations led Linus Torvalds to note, "I'm very ambivalent about gcc." He explained that on one hand he feels it's a great compiler with many great developers, but being an old project, "it has accumulated cruft over time, and cleaning things up is often almost impossible." He added that while compiler bugs can be frustrating, his real concern with the project remains in how some of the developers enforce language definition, "and seem to think that it's more important to read the language spec like a lawyer than it is to solve actual user problems."

"Basically, what the gcc developers are saying is that gcc is free to load and store to any memory location, so long as it behaves as if the instructions were executed in sequence," Nick Piggin noted, describing a linked discussion on the GCC development mailing list. He explained his concerns, "for x86, obviously the example above shows it can be miscompiled, but it is probably relatively hard to make it happen for a non trivial sequence. For an ISA with lots of predicated instructions like ia64, it would seem to be much more likely. But of course we don't want even the possibility of failures.