Re: GNAT GPL Edition Maintenance and Upgrades

["Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> > It also shows that AdaCore changed their mind and strategy
> > completely. ...
> ...
> Do you have any indication that AdaCore offers software under anything
> but GPL or GMGPL? I don't, and I don't think you have. I think there
> isn't any.
>
> They use "the modified GPL for runtime stuff", see FSF GNAT. They have
> made a new, *additional* offering by packaging tons of software for
> "writing free software".
>
> What makes you think that "AdaCore changed their mind and strategy
> completely?"

Samuel is exactly right.  AdaCore _has_ made a fundamental change. They
are now doing exactly what they said they would _not_ do many many
times starting in 1994. If you weren't reading comp.lang.ada and
following GNAT back then, please use Google groups and go back and read
what the ACT/AdaCore people were saying back then.  They took great
pains to explain that exactly what they are now doing would be "bad".

Robert Dewar and ACT/AdaCore were downright passionate about creating
the GMGPL license and keeping the GNAT Ada compilers licensed under it
so the compilers could be used for any purpose, including for
proprietary software development.  Which lead many like myself to
passionately support AdaCore.

I don't understand your posts. You keep saying nothing has changed, but
AdaCore no longer makes public releases of the GMGPL version of the Ada
compiler (and tools). They are now doing something they never did
before. They are going out of their way to "cripple" the only "free"
version of GNAT they publish by removing the GMGPL exception language
from the source files.

The GMGPL is NOT the same as GPL. You seem to imply that they are
equivalent when they are not. If they were equivalent, the GNAT team
would not have spent time and money on lawyers to create the GMGPL.

Also, the FSF CVS repository is NOT the same as an AdaCore public
release of a GMGPL version of GNAT.  In the past, when AdaCore released
a new version up GNAT (up through 3.15p) they released an easily
installable complete Ada programming system that could be used for
proprietary software, on many platforms (Linux, Windows, Solaris,
etc.).

The FSF CVS tree is NOT equivalent because "we" have to compile usable
binaries on whichever platform we want to use the Ada compiler on, AND
we have to take it with the underlying gcc compiler platform which many
time is in an unstable state, just when the Ada compiler is stable, and
vice versa.  I can't think of a single time so far when the FSF gcc Ada
has been as "good" as any of the AdaCore public releases because of the
difficulty of getting a "stable" version of Ada in the CVS repository
at the same time the rest of gcc was "stable".

Steve