Watcom makes their proprietary compiler OPENSOURCE

[Jerry McBride]

Yup, they finally did it. The source is being released in bits and
drabs... the first chunk is pure source code, almost 29meg compressed.
Free for the taking at ftp://ftp.watcom.org/watcom/openwatcom...

I saw the announcement in Linux Announce usenet
group... here's the text

From: Kendall Bennett <KendallB at scitechsoft.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: ANN: Open Watcom 0.8.0 source code release!
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 10:06:07 CST
Organization: SciTech Software, Inc.
X-Newsreader: MicroPlanet Gravity v2.30

Hi All,

Today is a great day! We have just uploaded the first source code 
archive release of the Open Watcom Project! We have called this version 
of the code the 0.8.0 release, since we can't consider it the 1.0 
release until all the code is there and it can compile with the Watcom 
11.0c compiler. To date nearly all of the code under the \bld directory 
is there, along with batch files to set up build environments for 
Windows and OS/2 machines. Some stuff is missing (noteably all the 
Fortran source code), but it will be committed to the Open Watcom tree 
over the next few weeks. Also some source files could well have been 
broken during the process of attaching the Open Watcom project copyright 
header information. If you find any broken files, please let us know!

Also although you cannot simply run a full build right now, you can 
pretty much go into any directory and run 'wmake' with the 11.0c 
compiler installed on your machine (once you copy edit the \setvars.bat 
file of course!) on most projects and they will build. Naturally there 
are many dependencies on libraries etc, but it is easy enough to see 
which library it is requiring, CD to that directory and run wmake in 
that directory also. Eventually of course we will have the full build 
system working so that you can just say 'go' and it will all build ;-)

But the good news is that the source code has arrived! This is a *HUGE* 
amount of source code that has been released. This ZIP files contains 
over 18,000 source code files totalling nearly 78MB of just source code 
(no binaries!). It compresses down to about 28MB for the current ZIP 
file archive, and includes source code for so many things it would be 
difficult to list them all (just think, compiler, linker, assembler, 
editor, IDE, debugger, POSIX command line tools and much more!). Also 
note that included is full source code to the DEC Alpha compiler, which 
we built and quickly tested a week or so ago and it produced working 
code that ran under Windows NT 4.0 on a DEC Alpha machine ;-)

For more information see:

http://www.openwatcom.org
ftp://ftp.openwatcom.org/watcom/openwatcom

Remember, this is a *LOT* of source code. If you are not willing to get 
your hands dirty figuring things out for yourself, don't bother 
downloading the code. We can't answer 50,000 emails about how to 
compiler Open Watcom, and won't. So use at your own risk. But most of 
all:

ENJOY!!

Note: We have to extend a big thank you to Sybase and the people at 
Sybase that worked diligently with us over the years to finally make 
Open Watcom a reality. They know who they are, so "Thanks guys!".

-- 
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology!
-- 

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