Re: can one build commercial applications with latest gnat and other licenses related questions...

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

There is more information on these pages:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Installing
http://www.ada-france.org/debian/debian-ada-policy.html#The-variants-of-GNAT

As Georg hinted, do not confuse "commercial" and "proprietary". These
are orthogonal concepts; you can make your software:

- commercial (costs money) and proprietary (e.g. Oracle)
- non-commercial (i.e. no cost) and proprietary (e.g. Java, Adobe
Reader)
- commercial (costs money) and free as in freedom (e.g. GNAT Pro,
MySQL, Qt, Sourcery G++)
- non-commercial (no-cost) and free as in freedom (e.g. GCC, Apache).

If your software is free as in freedom (the latter two cases), you can
use GNAT GPL Edition. Otherwise, you must use either GNAT Pro or GCC
from the Free Software Foundation. MySQL and Qt have similar
arrangements.

You can also make your software proprietary but distribute it in
source-only form, perhaps under non-disclosure agreement. You would
then require your customers to compile your sources for themselves,
using whichever compiler thay have at hand. In that case, you can use
GNAT GPL Edition to develop and test your program: since you are not
distributing binaries, the licensing terms of the GNAT run-time library
do not affect your software.

You can also make commercial, proprietary software that you do not
distribute at all to your customers; instead, you make it available as
a web service, and require your customers to pay a subscription fee for
the use of the service. In this model, you can use GNAT GPL Edition,
since you are not distributing your software at all.

There may be other models that have not yet been discussed on this
list. I think this subject matter is worth a FAQ or a Wiki page
somewhere, if such does not already exist.

HTH

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.