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

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

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.

As for the comment that the lack of binaries made by ACT will inhibit
such contributions, I doubt it. People in a position to make useful
contributions are typically the people who can successfully build
from sources, and we would expect that one important contribution in
the future, as in the past, is these binary ports and builds (e.g.
ports for DOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Amiga, Mac, Nextstep, etc have all
come from volunteers in the Free Software Community.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies