Re: GNAT GPL Edition Maintenance and Upgrades

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Jean-Pierre Rosen a écrit :

> Ludovic Brenta a écrit :
> > [1] Quite to the contrary; the more I hear the "selfish argument",
> > the more I feel inclined to package GNAT GPL Edition, just to teach
> > selfish people that if they refuse to give, then they cannot take,
> > as Georg Bauhaus said so nicely.
> >
> Not a formal vote, but...
>
> I think that this argument goes *against* the spirit of free software.
> As far as I can understand, the basis of free software is "you can do
> anything with this software, *except* deny to others the rights you have
> received". Anything, including proprietary software.

Precisely.  With the GMGPL, you receive the right to see and modify the
source code of the GNAT run-time; but you can also deny others this
same right.  The GPL is more "free" than the GMGPL, since with it you
cannot deny others this right anymore.  This is the "free" spirit as
defined by Stallman and the FSF.  The BSD license does allow you to
deny rights to others, and has a different definition of "free".

> The GPL edition is a big mistake made by AdaCore, both from a marketing
> and a popularity point of view. If the community clearly refuses this
> edition (and not having it in Debian is quite a strong indication),
> maybe AdaCore will revise its policy.

Yes, this is a possibility.

> Moreover, I find it quite logical for Debian to just use the standard
> GCC tree.

Well, latest /= greatest, that's why I kept gnat 3.15p in Debian for so
long instead of moving to GCC.  Also, GCC is not "standard" by any
measure (Ada is not a release criterion for GCC).  In contrast, GNAT
GPL
is "standard" by two measures: it has been blessed by AdaCore, and is
known to build ASIS, GLADE, GPS etc. correctly.

> The whole issue is about packaging, not the compiler. I even think that
> it would be OK to take the GPL edition, replace the offending packages
> from the version in the GCC tree, and release the whole stuff under
> GMGPL. But then, someone has to do the packaging...

I contemplated this idea, but when I saw the size of the diff, I backed
out.  I did "diff -I^-- gcc/gcc/ada gnat-gpl-2005-src/src/ada" (note:
ignoring comments and therefore the change of license) and found:

GCC 3.4.4 to GPL: 16.0 megabytes
GCC 4.0.1 to GPL: 11.0 megabytes
GCC HEAD  to GPL:  7.1 megabytes

Even with 4.1, the difference is huge.  And note that this is only the
Ada part of GCC.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.