Re: GNAT and GCC 3.0

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> 
> On  8/10, John English wrote:
> | David Botton wrote:
> | >
> | > Fantastic! I had misunderstood and thought that ACT would no longer be
> | > making public releases and public packages would become dependant on
> | > volunteers building their packages from the gcc sources...
> |
> | ...or would, like Perl/Python/Tcl, have Windows binaries available
> | from Active State with a restrictive license that makes them freely
> | downloadable but which prevents them being redistributed to third
> | parties... :-(
> 
> Please do not spread FUD.
> 
> This is *not* doable with GNAT. ACT does not hold the copyright on GNAT
> sources, and thus is not allowed to make any change to the license. Only
> the FSF, which is the copyright holder, would be allowed to distribute
> GNAT under a more restrictive license.

Does this apply to binaries? Certainly Perl, Python and Tcl are "open source"
in some form (Perl is Perl Artistic License, Tcl is (c) Regents of University
of Calfornia, Python is something else :) but this does not appear to apply to
precompiled binaries for Windows, which Active State say are not redistributable
without their permission. (I have asked for permission to do this but have not
received a reply to my email.)

The sources are of course available and redistributable.

Not being a lawyer, I don't know if the GPL would prevent such conditions
being imposed on a precompiled binary made from GPL source, or whether
the vendor is merely obliged to point you at the sources and say "here
you are, you can compile it yourself if you want to, but you can't give
away copies of *our* compiled binaries".

Certainly Active State's lawyers appear to believe that the Perl Artistic
License and the Regents of UoC license allow this kind of restriction to
be applied to binaries... :-(

If you tell me that this is indeed FUD, and that the GPL terms prevent
restrictions on redistributing binaries produced from GPL source, I will
be delighted to be proven wrong!

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.comp.it.bton.ac.uk/je
 Dept. of Computing        | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS **
 University of Brighton    |    -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------