Re: An article about the Cygnus tree

[David Edelsohn <dje at watson dot ibm dot com>]

	I find your "Introduction to the Cygnus Tree" to be riddled with
incorrect statements.  I do not understand why you apparently made no
attempt to investigate the facts before publicly releasing a thoroughly
inaccurate document.

	Cygnus, as a company, never has been the official FSF-appointed
maintainer of *ANY* GNU Project package.  Daily and weekly snapshots of
the various packages (gcc, gas, gdb, and binutils) were available to all
active developers prior to the public CVS repositories; they were not
developed solely by Cygnus or the FSF behind closed doors.  EGCS was not
run by Cygnus and characterizing it as competition with FSF's gcc project
is just one of numerous places where the description is far from
objective.  The hosting of the gcc.gnu.org site by Cygnus/Red Hat is not a
"dirty little secret".

	Whatever ax you have to grind, I would appreciate if you would
take it elsewhere instead of applying your prism to everyone else.  I
personally find your terminology and inferences highly offensive.
Spreading this sort of disinformation does not help the Free Software
Movement or help encourage a unified source tree and CVS repository for
GNU toolchain packages.

	The various maintainers and steering committees are not composed
of public relations experts, so we probably have been less communicative
and less quick to refute incorrect rumours than we should have been.
Filling in the missing information with conspiracies and accepting the
negative rumours is a normal human instinct, but easily resolved with a
little bit of investigation before producing a draft document.  I would
appreciate if you would demonstrate some comprehension and productive
involvement before you start patting yourself on the back for getting
things rolling.

David