Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

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

Jeffrey Creem wrote :
> Hopefully someone at Greenhills is paying attention to this discussion.
> This confusing license perhaps "exposing" a company to GPL terms when
> the headers clearly are not GPL will make a great writeup that will
> pretty much make it impossible to even use GNATPro within my company.

I don't understand. Did your company not receive a license statement
from AdaCore along with GNAT Pro? Which company do you think is being
"exposed to the GPL terms"? And what does GreenHills have to do with
it? I wouldn't expect any problems, since AdaCore and GreeHills have a
formal agreement.

> At this point, it would seem the only purpose of the public CVS archives
> is to entrap people to allow AdaCore to sue at will. Comments and
> threads like this are of course likely to cause AdaCore to pull the CVS
> archives and that will be somewhat of a shame for free software
> developers but in its current state, the public CVS archives are doing
> more harm than good.

No, I don't think AdaCore want to sue anyone. I would rather think they
are die-hard, purist Free Software believers, like RMS (i.e. "free up
your software or pay"). Furthermore, they do not seem very eager to
serve the market of SMEs and one-man shops, who have been asking for
affordable GMGPL licenses for a long time. Well, that's their business
decision. As Marc A. Criley said so rightly, this decision just leaves
more room to Aonix and RR Software in that market.

I do agree that AdaCore's decision does more harm than good to Ada's
attractivity to SMEs. They are the only ones being hurt. The change of
license has no effect on corporations large enough to use GNAT Pro, or
on students, hobbyists, or free software developers.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.