Re: Precisely why can't official FSF GNAT maintainers copy bug fixes in GNAT & its GCC-contained runtime en masse from GNAT GPL Community Edition?

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Saturday, May 5, 2018 at 2:04:29 PM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> On Saturday, May 5, 2018 at 10:58:56 AM UTC-5, Lucretia wrote:
> > On Saturday, 5 May 2018 15:19:23 UTC+1, Dan'l Miller  wrote:
> > > On Saturday, May 5, 2018 at 7:44:54 AM UTC-5, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> > > >
> > > > GNAT Pro -> GNAT GPL -> FSF GNAT
> > > 
> > > Yes, that is how I suspect that it is as well.
> > > 
> > > The question is where precisely historically did each of the files is the GNAT-Pro branch originate?  I suspect that even the oldest of these are files whose 
> > 
> > Back in 1995, when I was learning Ada9X, GANT was distributed separately from GCC as it hadn't been accepted into the main tree, AFAIK. As of GCC-2.95.1 which is around EGCS era IIRC, there is no gcc/ada directory. I managed to find these:
> > 
> > http://archive.adaic.com/ase/ase02_02/lang/ada/gnat/3.12p/
> > http://sunsite.rwth-aachen.de:3080/ftp/pub/mirror/cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/3.15p/
> > 
> > You'll find there are copyright notices belonging to FSU as well there.
> > 
> > > rights to copy were assigned to FSF by NYU 1992 to 1993, likely predating even the formation of AdaCore (and its twin in France).  My suspicion is that even 
> > 
> > AdaCore was "spun out of NYU" and I still have no clue how it became a French company.
> 
> As shown in a 1996-era website
> http://www.cs.scranton.edu/~beidler/Ada/gnat/a-diocst.ads
> the assignment of copyright apparently started in 1992, at least for this file in the runtime.
> 
> AdaCore's own website states that AdaCore was launched in 1994 after the assignment of the rights to copy were assigned to FSF.
> 
> Release 1.83 of GNAT was prior to July 1994, directly from New York University.

On those old Walnut Creek Ada CDROMs (especially the March 1994 one), the 23 December 1993 release 1.67 of GNAT has a copyright notice that reads “Copyright (c) 1992, 1993, NYU”, apparently prior to the assignment to FSF (and definitely prior to the formation of AdaCore in 1994).  GNAT-the-compiler itself was licensed under the GPLv2.  (Perhaps the “modified” idea for the GMGPL was more of an idea from Florida State University than from NYU.)