Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <36E43789.12AAED5C@chocolatesaltyballs.com>,
  root <white@chocolatesaltyballs.com> wrote:
> The only way you could have done this was to have
> exclusive copyright on the whole of GNAT. This IS an
> insight for me, thank you, however you don't, so you
> can't, so stop saying you could. (just thought! or gain
> exclusive copyright via purchase of the copyright from
> all the other parties of the GNAT version who's  upgrade
> is to be made proprietary ! I wonder if Microsoft are
> about to make Linus and his mates an offer they can't
> refuse?!?  )

(by the way, please stick to usenet conventions and keep
your lines under 80 characters, you are sending gigantic
long lines which are a pain!)

Could be done in theory, but in practice it would not work,
either for Linux or for GNAT. Suppose someone did decide
to buy the copyrights from NYU, ACT, and FSU (those are
I think the only ones at the moment). Then they made a
proprietary GNAT.

Would that work well? I don't think so! Someone, maybe
even the people at ACT :-) would just take the GPL'ed
sources and continue to work with them. Yes, one might
hypothesize that this new entity would do such a much
better job of maintaining and developing GNAT that the
proprietary version would prosper, but it seems unlikely
to me, and even more unlikely in the case of Linux. In
fact ACT would not be willing to assign the copyrights
except using the FSF form of assignment.

> >Suppose for example, you write some GPL'ed unit, you
> >then assign the copyright in the normal manner to IBM.
> >They then make a proprietary version, which they hold
> >the copyright to, and refuse to license it, even to you.
> >Sound unfair?

> Definitively, which is a good reason to keep your
> copyright and not sign it over to a commercial interest
> like ACT for example. ACT can become IBM-ACT overnight if
> the price is right. Yes, you've stated you're a private
> company, so hostile takeover of ACT is improbably, but
> who knows what the commercial future for an
> Ada compiler vendor/support company is (Rosy I hope :).

You missed an absolutely crucial point, which I think I
made quite clearly. I was contrasting here the process of
assigning your copyright to a commercial entity like IBM,
to assigning it to a commercial entity like the FSF.

What's the difference here? The difference is the form of
the assignment. If you have not read the FSF assignment
document, do so! You will find that it is cleverly crafted
to exactly prevent the scenario I present above for IBM.

So if you *do* assign your GPL copyright, and you do not
want this to happen, then make sure you use the FSF
assignment form. As I noted clearly in my original message
ACT would only accept assignments under these conditions,
and the whole point is that if software is assigned in
this manner to ACT, then even if ACT does become ACT/IBM
overnight (the Ada market presumably having improved
considerably :-) then it would NOT be possible to
"proprietarize" the assigned software.

> No! I'm not confused. I'm just envisaging a situation
> where some commercial interest abuses the GPL, who's
> going to defend the GPL work? It would fall to the
>FSF/Richard Stallman to pick the flag up. If I wrote some
> work, placed it under the GPL and had it ripped by
> Microsoft, the most I could do would be to report it to
> FSF/Richard Stallman, the flag bearers of the licence,
> and they'd definitely be interested because of
> precedence

precedent I assume you mean to say

Certainly Richard might be willing to offer advice, but as
I mentioned before he would not have legal standing in such
a case. It is basically up to you to protect your own
copyright. Note incidentally that recent court decisions
have usefully clarified that copyright is not just of the
literal expression of code, but also of its various levels
of abstraction, so the copyright protection which underlies

> Yes. I should have known better than to use the term
> "copyleft" when talking re lawfully binding licence. I
> was trying to rise above the strict interpretation of the
> GPL, to highlight the intent.

Well I am always amused by people proclaiming that they
know the true intent of the GPL, and then complaining at
us that we somehow are not following it, when in fact we
work closely with Richard Stallman, and he knows exactly
how we work, and *he* is perfectly comfortable that it is
appropriate. We are indeed one of the few companies that
is 100% committed to open source software for all our
products, and that is considered part of the GNU project
by Richard (and by us!)

> I can't predict the future, no more than you, but I would
> wager that the day GNAT has a single copyright source of
> ACT, is the day everyone has to pay for a new version
> (and not just the cost of making the CD). You can
> disagree and almost certainly will, it's just my view and
> that's my right.

You of course have no basis whatsoever for this claim, but
you are right, people are free to make any outrageous claim
they like at any time!

In fact we have found that following a fully open source
policy has proven profitable and is widely accepted in
the Ada community. It is one of the things that
distinguishes GNAT from the competition, and it would
not only be a violation of our stated policy, but would
also be plain commercial foolishness to change it!

> I shall watch the percentage of ACT copyright notices in
> GNAT with interest.

For GNAT proper, that is the compiler and the Ada 95
run-time library, you will not see much change. The
percentage now is zero, and will remain zero.

The place we use ACT copyrights is for completely new
developments of new tools and new systems. Note that if
we *wanted* to go the proprietary route, we perfectly well
could with these new tools. For example, we could charge
for the GNAT.xxx library hierarchy separately and make it
proprietary.

Or we could play the game Cygnus plays with win32, and
release it under the GPL, so it could only be used in
GPL'ed programs, and not in proprietary programs, and then
have an expensive proprietary version.

But in fact, all such tools under the ACT copyright have
been issued in full open source format, using the GNAT
modified GPL (a license incidentally that ACT pioneered
to deal with making the runtime as usable as possible in
as wide a variety of programs as possible).

Why?

Because that is the way we do business!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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