Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[wojtek@power.com.pl]

> I asked for votes about the next Ada compiler in Debian only because I
> want to do what users want.

Well, I'm one of those few crazy SME people actually trying to produce
some commercial software in Ada. No, I do not feel betrayed :-) But
GNAT GPL is not an option for us, neither are AdaCore support fees, at
least for the time being :-)

Apart from this, AdaCore has just surprised some people. Is there any
indication that this relase is not incidental and that there are going
to be follow-up releases in this line?

> If this dependence on AdaCore is really a problem, the solution is
> independence from AdaCore, not complaints.  This independence exists
> today in the form of the FSF tree.

It exists and I believe it will continue to exist. FSF is the copyright
holder, so if the "Modified" clause were removed from FSF tree, AdaCore
would be unable to provide the runtime sources to its customers under
GMGPL anymore, either.

Finally, this is not new. The same happened to MySQL and SAPDB -
drivers went from LGPL to GPL, which surprised many people. XFree86 has
been forked because some people wanted to be more famous than other.
OpenBSD has forked apache because of their new license. Now GNAT, oh
well.

Regards,
Wojtek