From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,35ce1c7836290812 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long) Date: 1999/03/05 Message-ID: <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> X-Deja-AN: 451565868 References: <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com> <7bhlb2$h4n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com> <7bkasm$rlt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com> <7bmbr5$j3p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x10.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Mar 05 15:08:52 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-03-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com>, spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote: > dewar@gnat.com wrote: > From later comments in your post re the interpretation of > the letter versioning, you could go further and state > that 3.11b2 "IS" 3.11p in source tree and binary build > terms. No, we would not go further and make any such statement. We make no statements at all about the 3.11p version, since we have no control over it once it is out there. We only make guarantees with respect to our supported commercial technologies. Clearly the source tree is NOT identical, it is at the least different with respect to the version number embedded into the source at several points. The most we will say is that 3.11p is based on 3.11b2. > Specifically, you have clarified that the commercial GNAT > is GPL code, ACT irrespective of their commerical > commitment to open source, are compelled by the terms of > GPL to release any and ALL future versions of GNAT under > the GPL This is quite wrong in two important respects. The GPL never forces anyone to release anything. If ACT decided that all future versions of GNAT will be private to ACT and used only within ACT, that would be completely consistent with the GPL. Similarly, if ACT decided that future versions of the ACT copyrighted components of GNAT were to be released in fully proprietary form, that would be perfectly consistent. Giving someone a license to your copyrighted creation does not place limitations on YOU, the author! These are indeed common misconceptions. In particular, I have talked with several companies recently who were quite surprised to find that they could do the following: 1. Issue an open source version of software X under GPL 2. Issue a deriviative work that was fully proprietary FOr example, you could have a crippleware product that was under the GPL, and the fancy version with bells and whistles as fully proprietary. Cygnus does something a little like this with Cygwin. The public version is under the strict GPL, which means that it CANNOT be incorporated into proprietary programs. If you want this kind of incorporation you have to buy their proprietary version, which, to a first degree of approximation, is identical except for the license. This is perfectly legitimate. In fact ACT is committed to making future versions of our technology publicly released under the GPL or GNAT-modified GPL (GGPL) as appropriate, but this is a result of corporate policy, there is nothing in the GPL that requires this. Here are two useful things to remember: The GPL NEVER requires anyone to distribute a program under ANY circumstances at ANY time. It does place restrictions on you if YOU choose to distribute. The GPL is just a license. Open source software under the GPL is like any other software on the market. It is copyrighted software to which you are granted a limited license. Granting a license to people in no way restricts the copyright holder's ability to do anything they like with their own work. > Strange that you inflict your "Beta" versions exclusively > on your paying customers. I think the success of open > source has been based on public releases feeding back to > the developers bug reports. Not so strange. Beta versions of this type are given only to customers who request them, and who have full support should they run into any problems. That makes a big difference. What may be a small installation glitch in a version given to a customer, where the problem can be solved instantly under their support contract, may be a big problem for a general public release. The criteria for a public release, to be used by lots of people with no support are different. > Having run a GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many > others are use to "feature-rich" pre-releases. More than you think, development of GNU and Linux software happens on private trees that do not begin to be public. In fact they are private enough that often people are not aware of them. I often meet people who think that EGCS is the Cygnus development tree. In fact of course it is not, there are major developments going on internally in Cygnus which they do not tell the outside world about. The difference with ACT is that we tell people what is going on, and share our future plans much more openly. But no major open source development that I know of is much different. There is a public version that represents technology that is one step behind the current development technology. In this respect open source software is really very little different from normal proprietary software. The other point here is that the public releases of GNAT are quite conciously aimed at the large mass of Ada users, NOT at hobbyists and enthusiasts who want to fiddle around. That creates a rather different market place. By far the most common use of GNAT is by beginning students, and the requirements here are quite different from those of many CLA readers :-) > As while I wouldn't go so far as to say ACTs position as > both commerical company and GPL code developer is unique > in the GPL world, they are certainly in a minority of GPL > developers. If you think that, it is probably because you do not know what is really going on! It would certainly be nice to see more activity in the publicly released tree. ACT itself does not have the resources to support the kind of active integration of changes that we see with EGCS (Cygnus budgets a substantial amount of resources for this purpose). Marcus Kuhn and others are trying to setup a similar environment for GNAT on a volunteer basis, and in addition, the GNAT front end will be integrated on some basis into EGCS (we are still discussing with the EGCS folk how to do this effectively). But not all GPL products have such an active public tree by any means. For example, GDB does not, and this is quite a problem, because, unlike the case with GNAT, there are several major companies doing major work on GDB, and there is no effective way to coordinate that work at the moment. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own