Oh, certainly! My claim isn't that libre software harms knowledge transfer at all. It's great!
But free compilers won so quickly even when they weren't obviously better that many proprietary compilers died quick, unceremonious deaths, with no obvious successors, and leading their authors to go into different areas. This was a bad thing, in my opinion, because a lot of early compilers were written in incredibly clever ways, and those clever ways died with them.
I think my comment was also worded poorly:
> I appreciate
> that free software "won" to some extent
is how I was hoping it would be interpreted, but I think it was interpreted as:
> I appreciate
> to some extent
> that free software "won"
Free software winning was absolutely the right thing, I just wish it would have been a bit less sudden.
I'm still really interested in concrete specifics of what has been lost. Right now it just sounds like magic, which leaves me skeptical. I'm a huge fan of programming languages as a field and hope to someday do research in it, and this is a bit of history I'm not well versed in.
Compare Symbolics Genera to a Free Software Common Lisp development environment today (SBCL and SLIME on GNU Emacs). The latter does a lot less and is more bloated. Commercial Common Lisp compilers like Allegro and LispWorks have features and optimizations that Free Software compilers lack (Allegro has really good debugging tools and garbage collection, LispWorks has excellent support for concurrent programming).
Intel Fortran compiler and their C++ compiler produce the fastest code. Lucid Energize and IBM VisualAge C++ did incremental compilation and had IDE features not available with Free Software C++ compilers and editors/debuggers.
Genera ran on actual Lisp machines, I feel that that is not a fair comparison.
It's not exactly hidden knowledge that the Intel compilers produce the best code, it's just that they have draconian licensing requirements. Furthermore, that knowledge cannot possibly be lost, because they're still actively developed to this day. I'm interested in the technological specifics of what these older platforms did that the newer ones cannot do, and why the knowledge of how to do them has been lost.
But free compilers won so quickly even when they weren't obviously better that many proprietary compilers died quick, unceremonious deaths, with no obvious successors, and leading their authors to go into different areas. This was a bad thing, in my opinion, because a lot of early compilers were written in incredibly clever ways, and those clever ways died with them.
I think my comment was also worded poorly:
> I appreciate
> that free software "won" to some extent
is how I was hoping it would be interpreted, but I think it was interpreted as:
> I appreciate
> to some extent
> that free software "won"
Free software winning was absolutely the right thing, I just wish it would have been a bit less sudden.