Re: GNAT GPL Edition Maintenance and Upgrades

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

Steve Whalen wrote:

> AdaCore _has_ made a fundamental change. They
> are now doing exactly what they said they would _not_ do many many
> times starting in 1994. If you weren't reading comp.lang.ada and
> following GNAT back then, please use Google groups and go back and read
> what the ACT/AdaCore people were saying back then.  They took great
> pains to explain that exactly what they are now doing would be "bad".

"One of the guarantees that we make to customers right now is
that they can use GNAT libraries without any concern about
acquiring problematic licensing conditions that would apply
to their generated programs. This is of course achieved in
our case by use of the GNAT modified GPL (GMGPL). Any license
that is at least this non-restrictive is fine with us.

"...
Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies"

I can't find statements that Ada Core is/was commited to releasing
only GMGPL packages of their software.
I do remember reading that they would continue to contribute
their sources to the FSF tree.

> The GMGPL is NOT the same as GPL.

The GMGPL is a modification of the GPL, using the same licensing
text. In this sense, GMGPL is not a separate license.

> You seem to imply that they are
> equivalent when they are not.

Whether you consider GPL and GMGPL to be equivalent in effect
is a different question (and one that matters). For sure I don't
consider the exception to be meaningless. Certainly one effect of the
GMGPL exception is that you can distribute closed-source programs,
(unless you use a software component that uses some other license
with its own terms).


> Also, the FSF CVS repository is NOT the same as an AdaCore public
> release of a GMGPL version of GNAT.

Yes. In fact, the (most welcome) 
gcc version 3.4.5 20050524 (prerelease) for GNAT GPL 2005 (20050614)
has bugs that the FSF GNAT doesn't have, and vice versa.

> The FSF CVS tree is NOT equivalent because "we" have to compile usable
> binaries on whichever platform we want to use the Ada compiler on, 

You don't have to compile GNAT yourself if you are using Windows,
or GNU/Linux (or Solaris, I believe), or Mac OS X. That should cover
a number of non-embedded platforms, don't you think?
In fact, Debian/GNU Linux has an integrated set of additional libraries
for use with GNAT.