Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com]

In article <36E6361A.D651CAD7@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:

> Funny. I contacted GNU.org via email sometime ago and
> they toldme that while ACT were perfectly entitled to
> require you to part with a "support" fee for a copy of
> their "commercial" version it was not in the spirit of
> the GPL and anyone who obtained a copy was still free to
> redistribute it. For the price of a CD for example.

Well who knows how you described the situation. The fact is
that Richard Stallman, with whom I talk frequently, knows
exactly what we do and is perfectly comfortable with our
way of doing business. Probably what caused the confusion
when you sent mesages to gnu.org (note you did not quote
your message that you sent them), was that you implied
that the commercial version was significantly different
from the public version, which it is not (the significantly
here covers just two things:

  1) the version number
  2) the fact that the public version has no warranty,
     whereas the commercial version is warranteed.

Note also that of course once the public version is out,
we have no control over what happens to it then, and you
can't be sure that what you have is exactly what we
distributed (it might have bug fixes and be better, and
then again, the fixes might be incorrect, since for one
thing the regression tests that we use are not available
publicly -- they cannot be because they are primarily
proprietary customer code).

> Well, depends what gets your goat as to what you find
> outrageous.The basis I have for this claim are GPL
> versions I cannot see without paying a fee well above
> redistribution costs.

Once again, there is absolutely NOTHING in the GPL that
suggests that GPL software must be made available for the
distribution costs. The fact that ACT does in fact make
our software available, without even charging the
distribution costs (which we assume), is nothing to do
with the GPL.

> Calling a GPL work "commerical"

The idea that GPL'ed software is somehow inherently
non-commercial is actually fundamentally at odds with
the intention of the GNU project, which is very definitely
intended to provide the possibility of viable commercial
alternatives to proprietary software. Remember that
commercial does not mean proprietary!

> restricting its redistribution

We do not restrict redistribution in any way. As you
frequently point out, anyone who has the commercial
version is free to distribute it. They do not do so
probably because

1) Companies like Boeing (the license holder) are not in
the business of redistributing licensed softare to others.

2) They understand that such distribution would not be
particularly helpful to the Ada community. In particular,
it is useful for people to understand

But at no point do we in ANY WAY restrict redistribution.
This is a claim your are making without substance.

> and asking everyone to believe on trust ( however well
> place) that theres no functional difference between
> this and the "public" version is something I find
> outrageous.

I see no basis for this outrage. We freely choose to
distribute the products of our labor under the GPL
(that's our choice for much of the system that we have
created at ACT, no one forces us to do that), and we
fully adhere to requirements of the GPL (though actually
no one forces us to do that either, for example if we did
not distribute the sources of ACT copyrighted stuff, the
GPL has nothing to say about it, ACT owns that software.

The important thing to realize is that GPL is not some kind
of guarantee that an author will always do the things you
want them to do. No one can force the creator of
copyrighted software to behave in a particular manner.

You are quite right, ACT has a stated policy, which it has
unwaveringly followed, to be fully committed to open source
software. Unlike some other open source software companies,
we have not waffled around on this issue, and trie to
proprietarize some components of what we do. But that does
not mean that ACT might not change its mind in the future.

I am sure that what would happen if ACT did change its mind
would be that some other organization would pick up where
ACT left off. Maintaining and developing an Ada tool chain
is not an inexpensive project, ACT invests of the order of
millions of dollars a year in this task, but so far the
open source model has worked well to support this activity,
so it is hard to see why, from a purely commercial point of
view, ACT would change its business practices since they
are working well. Indeed, in this age where
commercialization of open source software is becoming more
and more accepted and known, we find that our business
model is regarded as less and less peculiar!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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