From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,d0f6c37e3c1b712a,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "Ludovic Brenta" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Ada in Debian: most libraries will switch to the pure GPL in Etch Date: 27 Jun 2006 03:58:40 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1151405920.523542.137920@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 212.190.145.10 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1151405925 9109 127.0.0.1 (27 Jun 2006 10:58:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:58:45 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: G2/0.2 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; fr-FR; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040116,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) X-HTTP-Via: 1.1 SEVPXS01 Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com; posting-host=212.190.145.10; posting-account=ZjNXewwAAADyBPkwI57_UcX8yKfXWOss Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:5056 Date: 2006-06-27T03:58:40-07:00 List-Id: I received detailed answers from AdaCore's Robert Dewar and Arnaud Charlet regarding the licenses of software downloaded from their servers. In summary: - All software downloaded from AdaCore is pure GPL, no matter what the headers say. - This also applies to software downloaded from the CVS server in source-only form. - They refuse to give any assurances regarding copyright ownership, so I feel that I now need to go ask the authors. - They will not sign a license document, even if a lawyer asked them (they are not required to sign anything, of course). As you all know, Gentoo has switched to the pure GPL for all Ada libraries, in accordance with these statements. IANAL but this seems to be the only legal route, so Debian will follow suit and switch to the pure GPL for future versions of the libraries. ASIS-for-GNAT is copyright (c) Free Software Foundation. Theoretically, I could ask the FSF for a GMGPL license, and maybe get the sources from gnat-asis.sourceforge.net, but that's unlikely to work with GCC 4.1 without major work. So, switch to pure GPL. AUnit was written by Ed Falis, an AdaCore employee. Only source is AdaCore, so switch to pure GPL. AWS was written by Dmitryi Anisimkov and Pascal Obry. Neither of them being an AdaCore employee (at least AFAIK), there may be a way to acquire a GMGPL license from them. They may also decide to fork the project on a new repository. Pascal's site [1] has a download page that points to AdaCore's web site. In the mean time, AdaCore is the only source, so switch to pure GPL. Florist was written by Florida State University; it is possible to get a version ported to GCC 4.1 from http://gnat-florist.sourceforge.net, so I'll do that. GMGPL. GLADE was written jointly by AdaCore, the ENST, A. Strohmeier, T. Wolf and J. Kienzle. Only source is AdaCore, so switch to pure GPL. GtkAda was written by Emmanuel Briot, Joel Brobecker, Arnaud Charlet, and Nicolas Setton, who are all AdaCore employees. Only source is AdaCore, so switch to pure GPL. libgnat is GMGPL, since we obtained it from the FSF's repository as part of GCC 4.1. PolyORB is copyright (c) Free Software Foundation. The situation is exactly the same as with ASIS: the FSF doesn't seem to be aware of PolyORB, the only place to get it from is AdaCore, and that's pure GPL. PolyORB has a home page [2], but the download link points to AdaCore. (that doesn't matter for now, since Debian does not provide PolyORB). Templates_Parser, a library that is incorporated into both AWS and GPS, is copyright (c) AdaCore. It seems that the author, Pascal Obry, has assigned copyright to them. If that's untrue (and the headers are in error), then my remarks on AWS apply to Templates_Parser, too. (Debian includes Templates_Parser as part of AWS and GPS, but not as a separate package). XML/Ada was written by Emmanuel Briot (an AdaCore employee), Christophe Baillon and Martin Krischik. Only source is AdaCore, so switch to pure GPL. AdaCore, or AdaCore employees, are authors of AUnit, GLADE, GtkAda, and XML/Ada. They might volunteer a GMGPL version of their work, but I'm not going to ask them for one. Since GtkAda has been mentioned more than any other library, I'd like to point out that Debian already includes two alternatives: - AdaBindX [3], a binding to X11 and LessTif by Hans-Frieder Vogt which is under GMGPL. X11 is under X11 (MIT) license, and LessTif[4] is under LGPL. But AdaBindX has not been updated since 2000, and is not portable. And not as good-looking as GTK+. According to Debian's Popularity Contest [5], this package has zero users, so I am tempted to drop it from Etch. Speak up if you want me to keep it. - TASH, the Tcl Ada SHell [6], includes a binding to Tk; it is available as a Debian package, under GMGPL, from Ada-France [7] and AdaWorld [8]. TASH is portable, but has not been updated since 2003. [1] http://www.obry.net [2] http://polyorb.objectweb.org/ [3] http://home.arcor.de/hfvogt/programming.html [4] http://www.lesstif.org/ [5] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?popcon=libadabindx [6] http://www.adatcl.com/ [7] http://www.ada-france.org/debian/ [8] http://www.adaworld.com/debian/ Thoughts, comments, offers to help? -- Ludovic Brenta.