Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

["Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<67F27.14089$Kf3.151364@www.newsranger.com>...
> 
> > As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many
> > contributions from outside of your customer community, simply because
> > the licensing terms are not usable for serious outside users.
> 
> Well T.E.D. seems to identify "serious outside users" with people
> like himself who use the public version of GNAT for developing
> proprietary code. This is a small community in any case, and not
> one that is likely to contribute much to Free Software projects
> (e.g. I can't remember T.E.D. contributing any code to GNAT).
> 
> However, a much larger, much more active, and much more interesting
> set of serious outside users (from the point of view of outside
> contributions) is people who are building and distribution Free
> Software components and tools. Such people have been the main
> outside contributors to GNAT and its associated technologies, and
> I would expect that to be the case.
> 
> In addition, our supported customers can and do contribute useful
> code, and they have a definite incentive to do so, because if their
> modifications are incorporated into the mainline GNAT sources, then
> they don't have to keep putting them in themselves.

It seems a little disingenuous to take Ted to task for "[using] the
public version of GNAT for developing proprietary code", when I'd wager
that over 95% of ACT's customers use the supported version of GNAT for
developing proprietary code.  Along with the fact that OpenToken is
licensed under the GNAT-modified GPL, so it's no more or less
proprietary than the GNAT library packages.

Ted may not have contributed code to the GNAT product, but he certainly
has contributed code to the Open Source and Ada development community.

Marc A. Criley
Senior Staff Engineer
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com