SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Paul Colvert]

Greetings All!

I have something of a mystery happening when using the GNAT Ada
compiler (GNAT 3.11p) on a SGI Onyx. I was hoping that someone out
there could enlighten me with this issue. I am sorry if this letter is
somewhat long, but it was the best that I could do. Thanks.

I have a simulation written in Ada95 that I am trying to build. My
source code directory looks something like this:

src/
....common/
...........common_files.ads
...........common_files.adb
....models/
...........model_1/
...................model_1.ads
...................model_1.adb
...........model_2/
...................model_2.ads
...................model_2.adb
...........model_3/
...................model_3.ads
...................model_3.adb
....linklib/
............main_program_1.adb
............main_program_2.adb

After successfully compiling the "common" source directory using this
command:

  gcc -c -g -O0 -n32 /the.absolute.path/filename

and each of the "models" source directories using this command:

  gcc -c -g -O0 -n32 -I/src/common /the.absolute.path/filename

I successfully compile two different "mains" in the "linklib" source
directory using this command:

  gcc -c -g -O0 -n32 \
    -I/src/common \
    -I/src/models/model_1 \
    -I/src/models/model_2 \
    -I/src/models/model_3 \
    /the.absolute.path/filename

At this point, I was able to bind and link the first "main" using the
following commands:

  gnatbind -A -n32 \
    -I/src/common \
    -I/src/models/model_1 \
    -I/src/models/model_2 \
    -I/src/models/model_3 \
    -I/src/linklib \
    main_program_1.ali

  gnatlink -A -n32 -o main_program_1 main_program_1.ali

But when I try to do the same thing with the second "main" using the
same commands, the gnatlink command errors out saying that it could not
find the file "common_files.ads". This appeared to be some kind of path
problem. After some man page reading, I defined two environment
variables, ADA_INCLUDE_PATH and ADA_OBJECTS_PATH, as this:

ADA_INCLUDE_PATH=\
/src/linklib:\
/src/models/model_1:\
/src/models/model_2:\
/src/models/model_3:\
/src/common

ADA_OBJECTS_PATH=\
/src/linklib:\
/src/models/model_1:\
/src/models/model_2:\
/src/models/model_3:\
/src/common

Now, I am able to successfully bind and link both programs using the
following commands:

  gnatbind -A -n32 main_program_1.ali

  gnatlink -A -n32 -o main_program_1 main_program_1.ali

and

  gnatbind -A -n32 main_program_2.ali

  gnatlink -A -n32 -o main_program_2 main_program_2.ali

Can anyone tell me why first method would work for one "main" but not
the other? I know I can use the environment variable method, but I am
really puzzled about the first method. Any help that could be offered
would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

P.S. For those who may not know, the "-n32" option is a SGI specific
ABI (Application Binary Interface).

--
Paul Colvert
colvert@ro.com

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Gautier]

Maybe I miss something, but normally once you
add the correct directories in ADA_INCLUDE_PATH and ADA_OBJECTS_PATH,
the commands:

gnatmake main_program_1
gnatmake main_program_2

- with the additional -n32 or other options - should do the job without
manually calling gcc, gnatlink, gnatbind,...

-- 
Gautier

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com>,
  colvert@ro.com wrote:
> Greetings All!
>
> I have something of a mystery happening when using the
> GNAT Ada compiler (GNAT 3.11p) on a SGI Onyx. I was
> hoping that someone out there could enlighten me with
> this issue. I am sorry if this letter is somewhat long,
> but it was the best that I could do. Thanks.

Please note that 3.11p does NOT support n32 mode. You may
be able to get it to partially work, but you will
definitely have problems. This option is not documented
in the GNAT users guide for a good reason.

If you need a version supporting n32 mode, contact your
SGI sales person.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Paul Colvert]

> > I have something of a mystery happening when using the
> > GNAT Ada compiler (GNAT 3.11p) on a SGI Onyx. I was
> > hoping that someone out there could enlighten me with
> > this issue. I am sorry if this letter is somewhat long,
> > but it was the best that I could do. Thanks.
> 
> Please note that 3.11p does NOT support n32 mode. You may
> be able to get it to partially work, but you will
> definitely have problems. This option is not documented
> in the GNAT users guide for a good reason.
> 
> If you need a version supporting n32 mode, contact your
> SGI sales person.
> 
> Robert Dewar
> Ada Core Technologies

I am sorry if I was unclear about this. I am using the SGI
Ada95 compiler (1.3?) which is based upon GNAT 3.11p compiler
and does support the SGI "n32" ABI.

--
Paul Colvert
colvert@ro.com

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[robert_dewar]

In article <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com>,
  colvert@ro.com (Paul Colvert) wrote:
> I am sorry if I was unclear about this. I am using the
> SGI Ada95 compiler (1.3?) which is based upon GNAT 3.11p
> compiler and does support the SGI "n32" ABI.

Well that's not quite right, the SGI Ada 95 compiler (1.3)
is based on 3.11b2, not on 3.11p (no commercial products
from ACT or SGI are ever "based on" the public version).

If indeed you are using the SGI 1.3 compiler, then you have
support from SGI, so you should contact SGI for assistance.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[SpamSpamSpam]

robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote:

> Well that's not quite right, the SGI Ada 95 compiler (1.3)
> is based on 3.11b2, not on 3.11p (no commercial products
> from ACT or SGI are ever "based on" the public version).
>

What is 3.11b2 "based" on ? what is its version history ? does its ancestor
tree ever meet up with the "public" 3.11p version history ? is 3.11b2 GPL ?
which came first the "public" GNAT compiler or the ACT commercial compiler
?

Am I write in presuming that the commerical version came first, since if
the GPL version came first, then commercial version being a modification
would be covered by the GPL and anyone obtaining the 3.11b2 version would
be free to re-distribute it provided they  extended the same GPL rights to
their distribution. Or did ACT develope two Ada95 compilers behind chinese
walls ?

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dennison]

In article <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:
>
> Am I write in presuming that the commerical version came first, since if
> the GPL version came first, then commercial version being a modification
> would be covered by the GPL and anyone obtaining the 3.11b2 version would
> be free to re-distribute it provided they  extended the same GPL rights to
> their distribution. Or did ACT develope two Ada95 compilers behind chinese
> walls ?

If you are asking if the compiler you have is covered by the GPL, that should
be easy to determine from your distribution. Just check the licensing
agreement!

T.E.D.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:

> What is 3.11b2 "based" on ? what is its version history ?
> does its ancestor tree ever meet up with the "public"
> 3.11p version history ? is 3.11b2 GPL ? which came first
> the "public" GNAT compiler or the ACT commercial compiler

As has been clearly stated before, 3.11p is derived from
the commercial version 3.11b2, and yes, of course all ACT
software is covered by the GPL.


> Am I write in presuming that the commerical version came
> first, since if the GPL version came first, then
> commercial version being a modification would be covered
> by the GPL

You are a bit confused here. So let me once again state how
we work at ACT.

There are basically three kinds of versions of GNAT around.

The Commercial versions (GNAT Professional)
-------------------------------------------

The commercial versions, designated by letters like a/b/c.
These are distributed to customers, and represent the
versions that we fully support under support contracts.

These are of course all under the GPL, or GNAT modified
GPL, as appropriate (the modifications allow the runtime to
be used with non-GPL'ed programs).

Generally we prefer these not be further distributed by
our customers because

a) We don't want versions to be distributed publicly till
they are in good shape and installation glitch free, since
it will only be a nuisance for users with no access to
support to be confronted with many versions of GNAT, some
of which may have problems. This was for example the case
with versions 3.11b and 3.11b1, which had some minor
regressions that we cleared up before distributing 3.11b2.

b) If a release is in good shape for distribution, we make
a corresponding public release. In this case 3.11p is
basically identical to 3.11b2.

The Public Releases
-------------------

THese are our full technology with no kinds of restrictions
or limitations. We release public versions from time to
time to correspond to stable customer releases of GNAT
Professional.

Note that we do not provide any kind of support for these
versions, and furthermore, we do not make any claims
(validation, Y2K, compliance) or anything else for the
public versions. For one thing, we have no control over
what happens to the public versions once they are released.

The distinction in version
numbers is helpful, because it makes clear what we support
and what we do not support. The "p" versions are our full
unrestricted technology, but they do not come with any kind
of support from us. Nevertheless they have proved very
helpful for student and research use.

Wavefront "versions"
--------------------

These are designated by a w after the version. They are
based on our latest development sources, and have been
verified to pass the ACT regression tests, DEC regression
tests, and the ACVC tests, but have had no field testing.

We make them available to our customers on an individual
request basis when there is no other way to correct a
current problem.

Again, we note to our customers that it is not helpful to
the community to distribute these wavefront versions, since
they are definitely not in the same well-tested state as
our major releases.

Current State
-------------

We have an internal 3.12 development version with lots of
new exciting features, and a number of bug fixes. We expect
to release 3.12a for field testing to our customers in the
near future, and as soon as we have a stable version, a
corresponding 3.12p will be released.

Patches
-------

There are a few fairly important patches to 3.11 technology
that we have developed and are testing. We will release
these in the very near future. One of particular interest
is a patch to the 3.11p NT version that allows COM files
to be built in a straightforward manner.

Chinese Walls
-------------

No such thing at ACT, the world of open source software
does not need such things :-)


Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[SpamSpamSpam]

dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> As has been clearly stated before, 3.11p is derived from
> the commercial version 3.11b2,

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. except that the "b2" bit means that it is ACT
supported, assuming that no-one has obtained a copy of 3.11b2 through a
third-party exercising their right under the terms of the GPL and
redistributing 3.11b2 in accordance with the terms of the GPL.

> and yes, of course all ACT software is covered by the GPL.
>

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 whether they deem it a "commercial" or "public" release, and anyone
has the right to redistribute whichever version under GPL terms.

> > Am I write in presuming that the commerical version came
> > first, since if the GPL version came first, then
> > commercial version being a modification would be covered
> > by the GPL
>
> You are a bit confused here.

The confusion arises from repeated posts regarding different versions of
GNAT, namely public and commercial, which lead me to believe that GNAT/ACT
was a similar GPL model to the  GHOSTSCRIPT/ALADDIN model, whereby there is
a better version of the GPL ghostscript code available from aladdin for a
fee that is not distributed under GPL.

I believe this is possible  because the origin code was not GPL, Aladdin
just  release older versions under the GPL as a "tempter" for anyone with a
"newer" printer with unsupported drivers. Thankyou for the clarification,
there is no better "stable" version of GNAT available than the public
3.11p, though commercial Ada projects using GNAT would benefit from support
and that is solely available from ACT.

> So let me once again state how
> we work at ACT.
>
> Generally we prefer these [ commercial versions]  not be further
> distributed by
> our customers because

... but it is their right under the terms of the GPL, by which ACT are
allowed in the first instance to modify it.

> a) We don't want versions to be distributed publicly till
> they are in good shape and installation glitch free,

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. Having  run a
GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many others are use to "feature-rich"
pre-releases.

> Chinese Walls
> -------------
>
> No such thing at ACT, the world of open source software
> does not need such things :-)

Granted, GPL code does not need protecting from itself.

Thank you for clearing up my misunderstanding, sorry if this is a rehash, I
have previously search dejanews, the FAQ and ACT homepage for "commercial"
"public" clarification of GNAT.  I do feel that question 4.2.1 of the
comp.lang.ada FAQ would benefit from the description of the versions
offered, 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.

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dennison]

In article <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:
> dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> > a) We don't want versions to be distributed publicly till
> > they are in good shape and installation glitch free,
>
> 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. Having  run a
> GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many others are use to "feature-rich"
> pre-releases.

ACT's position seems to be that the "public" versions are suitable for use
only by students and hobbyists. If you are trying to do serious work with it,
well that's horrifying, but hey, its your funeral.

The implication in that attitude is that publicly released OpenSource
software is unsuitable, even dangerous for use in a production environment.
It seems to me that this is antithetical to the evolving vision of OpenSource
software. The power in an OpenSource product is in the userbase, not the
company behind it. Doing anything to discourage use of the software by
prospective users is tantamount to slitting your own throat.

The company I work for makes no secret of using all sorts of "unsupported"
Open Source tools (gcc, emacs, perl, tk/tcl etc), and apparently makes a
pretty good living for itself doing so. I suspect you'd probably be
hard-pressed to find a fourune 100 company that *didn't* have someone using a
public version of one of those tools to do production development. Generally
the support you get from fellow users on usenet is far superior to what any
company could provide. And in a real pinch, you can go into the source and
fix a problem yourself. If we do *need* guaranteed support from experts for a
particular project we would be happy to pay for it.


T.E.D.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <7bov12$r8o$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dennison@telepath.com wrote:

> The company I work for makes no secret of using all sorts
> of "unsupported" Open Source tools (gcc, emacs, perl,
> tk/tcl etc), and apparently makes a pretty good living
> for itself doing so. I suspect you'd probably be
> hard-pressed to find a fourune 100 company that *didn't*
> have someone using a public version of one of those tools
> to do production development.

Whether you find it useful to use unsupported software
depends on your circumstances. Our policy at ACT is not
to use unsupported software for any critical purposes,
and that is the advice we pass on to our customers.

> Generally the support you get from fellow users on usenet
> is far superior to what any company could provide.

That may be true in general, but certainly our customers
do not consider it is true for the support that ACT
provides which is certainly NOT what is generally typical
in the field. Most certainly Ted cannot make a relevant
judgment here since he does not have ACT support. We have
certainly seen a number of occasions on which Ted has been
frustrated to run into problems that would have been solved
immediately if he had support. It all depends on how you
value your time, and how much of a problem it is if you
run into a blocking problem.

> And in
> a real pinch, you can go into the source and fix a
> problem yourself.

That's not really true, not "in a real pinch". Yes it is
certainly true that you can support GNAT yourself, and
indeed this possibility is important to many of our
customers. But there is a learning curve here, and you
need people who have some real knowledge of the GNAT
sources.

The scenario where you run into a problem, and then quick,
in emergency mode burrow into the sources. Furthermore if
you are selling this as a kind of insurance policy to your
management, it is bogus, given the need to ramp up in
people and experience before you could effectively solve
the problem.

Sure there may be limited cases in which this case be done,
and often customers for example make fixes or modifications
to run time units, but digging into the visibility circuits
of the compiler to figure out if a puzzling error message
is in fact a bug in GNAT or is a user error, and then
fixing it in the former case is not something you can
reasonably expect to do in an emergency.

> If we do *need* guaranteed support from experts for a
> particular project we would be happy to pay for it.

Of course one of the things here is that you don't really
know whether support would benefit you without trying it
out. This is why we discourage people from using the
public version of GNAT for evaluation. Instead, get an
evaluation contract from us, and evaluate for yourselves
how useful support can be.

A very large part of our support consists in helping people
with problems in their understanding of Ada or GNAT, or how
best to use these technologies. We also help people find
bugs in their programs in many cases as part of sorting
out what is going on.

I often see people flailing around on CLA, or chat@gnat.com
looking for help on problems that I am certain would be
solved quickly by our appropriate expert if they had an
ACT support contract.

As I say, it all depends on your requirements and needs,
and on how valuable your time is.

What we often see is serious projects trying to use GNAT
without support getting into a mess, and then deciding that
the mess means there is a problem with GNAT. Well that may
be true in some cases, but nearly always the problems could
be eliminated or at least managed in the context of proper
support.

That's why our position is that basically the public
version of GNAT is intended for student and research use.
If others find it useful fine, but that is not the audience
we are catering to with the public releases.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[root]

dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> 
> ACT's position seems to be that the "public" versions are suitable for use
> only by students and hobbyists. If you are trying to do serious work with it,
> well that's horrifying, but hey, its your funeral.
> 
> The implication in that attitude is that publicly released OpenSource
> software is unsuitable, even dangerous for use in a production environment.

Can we take a reality check here, ALL versions of GNAT are public! sure
ACT can call different versions "commercial" or "public" and charge a
"support" fee to provide you with a copy but you have the right to
redistribute them under the GPL. There should be no difference between
3.11b2 and 3.11p ( okay, bar the version printing header ) and if there
is (?), someone who works for
a company who have bought 3.11b2, should do the honourable, get
permission from their company and post it to alt.binaries.source.

if you're over 18 see the source header and send to root.

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <36E2531E.37AEECF1@chocolatesaltyballs.com>,
  root <white@chocolatesaltyballs.com> wrote:

> someone who works for a company who have bought 3.11b2,
> should do the honourable, get permission from their
> company and post it to alt.binaries.source.

In fact 3.11p and 3.11b2 are indeed virtually identical
(differing only in stuff related to the version name.
When we make public releases they are not somehow crippled
or incomplete, they are the full code at the time of
release.

As to whether it is viable for serious mission critical
projects to use unsupported software, that is something
that the project has to decide for itself. Our viewpoint
that the public version is more suited to student and
research use is an issue of support not bits!

It is true that some of our supported customers are using
more advanced versions of GNAT technology that is in alpha
or beta testing status. We generally ask that such test
versions NOT be distributed, since it definitely is NOT
helpful to have dozens of slightly different versions of
GNAT around, which have not been fully tested.

It would not be illegal for a company to distribute a test
version in this situation, but it would be unhelpful to
the community, and I doubt "honorable" would be the right
term for this :-)

In fact this is an old practice in the open source
community, and is used everywhere. For example, some
of Cygnus' customers have access to Cygnus internal
developments which are beyond the EGCS development, but
they are in a stage where it is not helpful to generally
distribute them, since work is needed to integrate them
into the current EGCS sources. Cygnus will do this work
in due course, so this technology will become available.

Richard Stallman has been quite comfortable with this kind
of request and understanding, and the FSF has often
operated this way in the past, and it has worked out well.

Hackers and hobbyists are often in a mode where they want
the latest and greatest whether or not it is fully tested
and working, and that is understandable.

However, one of the great fears that the "real world" has
of free/open source software is that it is out of control,
and that it is a free for all where no one knows what
version they have of anything or what's in it.

In actual fact, the important developments in open source
software (EMACS, GCC, GDB, LINUX, GNAT etc) are in fact
managed in a much more responsible way, and there are
stable well tested periodic releases, in much the same
manner as for proprietary software (well I think we do
a little better than Microsoft in getting out new versions
of GNAT :-)

P.S. GNAT 3.12 technology is on the way. We have most of
the work done for this new release, which has many new
interesting capabilities, and we are working towards an
early release, which will include a public version 3.12p.
We have no definite schedule yet, but we can say that the
wait for 3.12p will be much shorter than the 3.10p to 3.11p
gap (which was too long and too big a jump!)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

P.S. It's interesting, we have variations on this thread
every now and then, typically sparked by a new GNAT
enthusiast who was not around for the old threads. Never
mind, it is a good opportunity to sort out confusions with
the GPL.

One of the important accomplishments of the last few years
is that now almost all major companies are MUCH more
comfortable using open source software than they used
to be!


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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Marin David Condic]

dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> 
> The implication in that attitude is that publicly released OpenSource
> software is unsuitable, even dangerous for use in a production environment.
> It seems to me that this is antithetical to the evolving vision of OpenSource
> software. The power in an OpenSource product is in the userbase, not the
> company behind it. Doing anything to discourage use of the software by
> prospective users is tantamount to slitting your own throat.
> 

Actually, I think it is a very clever marketing strategy and one in
which both the supplier and the end user win. Think about it in this
light: 15 years ago, if you wanted to have an Ada compiler, you had to
shell out some serious cash and what you got was pretty crappy stuff.
This put Ada beyond the hobbyist, student, small start-up venture,
corporate hacker/developer (someone who may want to use it for
non-critical software, but can't persuade his boss to buy it for him.)
and others for whom the price was not practical. As a result, Ada
languished & never got the audience it deserved. Even its fans were
discouraged from using it. Did this help the compiler vendor? Did it
help the end user? I think everybody wins with the OpenSource model -
even if there are risks.

As to a public release being "unsuitable" for development - well if I
was building embedded engine controls with the compiler or some other
mission critical software or even some internal tools the success of
which were critical to the business, I'd buy the support because I need
the risk reduction. Cost of failure far exceeds cost of the support. So
I couldn't hardly fault someone at ACT for saying "caveat emptor" and
not recommending GNAT-sans-support for critical projects. The question
is how much risk are you willing to take and if you run into a bug that
halts your efforts are you willing to say "well, that's the chance I
took..."? I doubt warning somebody of this fact would hurt the product
any more than when someone is selling you fire insurance for your house.
Yes, once in a while they burn down and the loss is horendous if you
don't have insurance - but that doesn't hurt the home sales market much.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

    "Don't say yes until I finish talking."

        -- Darryl F. Zanuck

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[bourguet]

In article <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com>,
  spamwithchipsplease@spam.com wrote:
> dewar@gnat.com wrote:
>
> > a) We don't want versions to be distributed publicly till
> > they are in good shape and installation glitch free,
>
> Strange that you inflict your "Beta" versions exclusively on your paying
> customers.

Have you already supported Beta version? From a developper point of view,
I understand very well the interest of limited circulation of beta version.
It is usually the way other free sofware developement works... The
restriction may be other than beeing a customer of a compagny, but there is
often a restriction or at least a strong incitation of not using the latest
unstable version or the snapshot if don't want to help coding. Having
numerous reports of bugs already fixed is not something helpfull. And
published versions tend to stick on a long time.

> I think the success of open source has been based on public
> releases feeding back to the developers bug reports.

I think the interest of a more open development is in the number of persons
ready to help in other ways than just bug reports and testing. ACT may be
perhaps underestimating this help, but I've no way to tell. And I know that
I'd be of no value for this.

> Having  run a
> GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many others are use to "feature-rich"
> pre-releases.

That's your choice, not mine (I'm also using Linux but I tend to stick to a
release until there is something new I've a use for). And it is a different
problem than was is best for the development of the program.

-- Jean-Marc

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dennison]

In article <7bomut$jst$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  bourguet@my-dejanews.com wrote:

> > I think the success of open source has been based on public
> > releases feeding back to the developers bug reports.
>
> I think the interest of a more open development is in the number of persons
> ready to help in other ways than just bug reports and testing. ACT may be
> perhaps underestimating this help, but I've no way to tell. And I know that
> I'd be of no value for this.

Good point. There's probably no way to guage it at all at this point, short of
actually going that way.

T.E.D.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <7bp1m1$tt0$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> Good point. There's probably no way to guage it at all at
> this point, short of actually going that way.

Well for several years, we issued new releases VERY
frequently, and also provided free support for all
GNAT users, so indeed we have tried this. What we found
was the situation is much as it is now. People can and
do contribute by providing new packages, bindings, etc,
but we do not see (and did not see) much in the way of
contributions to the core technology.

That's not surprising at all, the compiler itself is a
complex piece of software, and just getting fully on top
of understanding it, let alone getting to the point of
making structural changes or even fixing simple bugs, is
not a casual part time occupation (remember that ACT has
the equivalent of about 16 full time people working on the
core technology).

Of course there are exceptions, and we appreciate these
exceptions. In several cases, people who have made these
kind of volunteer contributions are now working full time
for ACT or ACT/Europe :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

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

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dennison]

In article <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dewar@gnat.com wrote:

>   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!

Whoa! I have to admit I missed that one entirely. I guess its a good thing I'm
an engineer instead of a laywer.

T.E.D.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[robert_dewar]

In article <7bp6pv$2mm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> In article <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
>   dewar@gnat.com wrote:
>
> >   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!
>
> Whoa! I have to admit I missed that one entirely. I guess
> its a good thing I'm an engineer instead of a laywer.

But if you "missed that one entirely", it means you have
some strange peculiar view of the GPL (a not uncommon
phenomenon :-)

If I own a program, and I license you to use it, it is
very hard for me to see why you think that the license
I give to you would stop me from doing what I like with
the program. I am not transferring the rights in the
program to you, just licensing it.

When you get a licensed product from Microsoft, you know
perfectly well that they still own the program and can do
anything they like with it.

Well there is *nothing* unusual about the GPL in this
regard, it is simply a limited license giving the recipient
of the license certain limited rights to use the
copyrighted works. As with any license of this kind,
certain uses are permitted, and certain ones are forbidden.

Yes, the GPL is certainly more liberal in what it lets you
do than Microsoft's license, but that does not affect the
basic structure of the situation from a legal point of
view.

I often find that people, including attorneys sometimes,
have strange ideas about the GPL. Once they realize that
it is just a normal situation of a copyrighted work being
distributed under license it is much easier to understand.

Of course they can still be a bit puzzled with a license
whose language seems more intent on telling you all the
things you *can* do, rather than working hard to tell you
all the things you *cannot* do, and they may be even more
surprised if you tell them you paid nothing for the
license, but that is commercial rather than legal
surprise :-)

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[root]

robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> 
> In article <7bp6pv$2mm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
>   dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> > In article <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
> >   dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> >
> > >   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!
> >
> > Whoa! I have to admit I missed that one entirely. I guess
> > its a good thing I'm an engineer instead of a laywer.
> 
> But if you "missed that one entirely", it means you have
> some strange peculiar view of the GPL (a not uncommon
> phenomenon :-)
> 
> If I own a program, and I license you to use it, it is
> very hard for me to see why you think that the license
> I give to you would stop me from doing what I like with
> the program. I am not transferring the rights in the
> program to you, just licensing it.

Note the use of the "if" at the start. Are you claiming literal
ownership of GNAT? what do your
fellow contributors ( from your mates(?) at NY to joe bloggs on the
street who sent in a GPL 
bug fix to a GPL source ) say to that? Are they they ALL in unison ?
because if one of those contributors says NO, end of story. What would
the original US government dept that sponsored
the development of a "free" compiler say to that?

If I or anyone who came by the GNAT source through the GPL modified it
and released it to others it would have to be GPL as stated in section 4
and 5.  What you are saying is that you never can by the source through
the GPL, therefore you are not covered by it. Interesting point, but it
only takes one other contributor to say that their code fix which you
incorporated was released under the GPL for you to be bound by it.. so
get real. ALL versions of GNAT are GPL and they always will be, Richard
Stallman probably has a quad of legal cash waiting for the first
commercial enterprise to abuse the GPL, as that would set the precedent.

You can no more take GNAT back, that Larry Walls, Linus Torvalds and
Richard Stallman could take back perl, linux, or emacs.

> When you get a licensed product from Microsoft, you know
> perfectly well that they still own the program and can do
> anything they like with it.

So you have to use Microsoft as an example to make yourself look good in
the GPL world ?

> Well there is *nothing* unusual about the GPL in this
> regard, it is simply a limited license giving the recipient
> of the license certain limited rights to use the
> copyrighted works. 

The terms copyleft, and its simply a licence as a Rolls Royce and a Lada
are cars.

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <36E25778.C056829@chocolatesaltyballs.com>,
  root <white@chocolatesaltyballs.com> wrote:

Well a lot of confusion and misunderstanding here, so it
is a useful opportunity to clarify things:

> Note the use of the "if" at the start. Are you claiming
> literal ownership of GNAT? what do your fellow
> contributors ( from your mates(?) at NY to joe bloggs on
> the street who sent in a GPL bug fix to a GPL source )
> say to that? Are they they ALL in unison ?

The copyright for each part of the GNAT system is no
secret. You can find it in the appropriate unit in the
sources. There are basically the following copyrights
around:

1. Copyrights that have been assigned to the FSF by
NYU for the original work done at NYU (by the way almost
everyone on the NYU team now works full time for ACT!)
This was done by a normal FSF assignment. As always with
the assignment document, the original assignee retains
an unlimited license to do anything they want with the
program, but that license rests with NYU, and they are
unlikely to excercise it.

2. Copyrights that have been assigned to FSF by ACT for
follow on work. Obviously we could use our own copyright
for fixes and improvements to the basic GNAT modules, but
we choose not to, because it is our corporate policy that
all FSF copyrighted units continue to have the full FSF
copyright (see more discusssion below).

3. Copyrights that ACT holds. These are used for major
components developed after the NYU contract, some examples
are the SPITBOL routines in the GNAT library, and the JGNAT
backend. ACT is commited to releasing these components
under the GPL including future versions, but as I have
pointed out, this is a function of corporate policy, not
of the legal requirements of the GPL.

4. Copyrights held by third paries. Examples are the
tasking units which have an FSU copyright. These are
all covered by the GPL, and that is the basis on which
ACT uses these units. We intend to continue to provide
them in GPL'ed form, but of course the third party
copyright holders could excercise their rights to make
non-GPL'ed versions in the future.

> because if one of those contributors says NO, end of
> story.

Well it is worse than this if you think about it. What if
someone makes a fix that is not under the GPL, then you
have a deriviative work that cannot be distributed without
the explicit permission of both copyright holders (because
of course the GPL one one part does not permit you to
distribute other things not covered by the GPL). Note that
in this case the holder of the copyright on the non-GPL'ed
modification cannot distribute the combined work, since
the GPL prevents this.

What the FSF does, and what we do, is to accept changes
only if the copyright situation is dealt with
satisfactorily. There are various possibilities here

1. Small fixes are considered de minimis and
non-copyrightable. A usual standard has been that anything
up to ten lines is covered by this (this is the standard
that for example gcc has used). We prefer to treat even
small changes as in para 2 following where possible, but
certainly if someone points out that a word is wrongly
spelled in the documentation, they do not have an
enforcable copyright interest in the correct spelling :-)

2. Larger contributions must involve either an assignment
of copyright, or a waiver of copyright interest. At ACT,
we have a large file of such waivers on hand, and that is
a normal procedure for the maintenance of GPL'ed software.
It is just not feasible to have a single file in which many
different people have a legal copyright interest.

3. Public domain work of any kind is of course not a
problem. Essentially this is work for which the author
has in advance issued a waiver.

4. Completely separate units can be incorporated into GNAT
with the original author's copyright where appropriate.

> What would the original US government dept that sponsored
> the development of a "free" compiler say to that?

The contract with the US government had two requirements:

1. All units were to be released under the GPL or LGPL (we
later decided on the more permissive GNAT modified GPL for
the latter purpose).

2. All copyrights were to be assigned to the FSF

Most certainly the original US government dept that
sponsored GNAT has no control or say in what happens at
this stage. The contract was completed, and the conditions
of the contract were met to the satisfaction of the
government auditors.

If ACT or some other entity had decided to maintain GNAT
on a proprietary basis (the GPL makes this trickier but
by no means impossible), then that would have been too bad
but not a contract violation.

Really what I am stressing here is that neither the GPL
nor the expired government contract require that GNAT be
handled in a completely open manner (e.g. that public
releases continue to be made). This is a function of
clearly stated ACT policy.

I constantly run into people who think that ACT is somehow,
by someone, or something, *required* to make public
releases of GNAT. But this is definitely not the case,
it is something we are committed to do, because we feel
it is an important contribution to the Ada community. The
ACT policy here has been absolutely clear from the start,
and I will restate it again, so there can be no confusion:

"It is the policy of Ada Core Technologies, and ACT/EUrope,
that GNAT and its associated tool set will continue to be
distributed under the GPL (or GGPL) and that public
versions will be released from time to time that reflect
the complete state of the technology in open source form."

> If I or anyone who came by the GNAT source through the
> GPL modified it and released it to others it would have
> to be GPL as stated in section 4 and 5.

If you have a legitimate license (the GPL in this case),
you can certainly modify it and distribute the modification
in any form allowed by the GPL (your modification does not
have to be under the GPL, it can be under a more liberal
license, e.g. be in the public domain, that is up to you).

For ACT to incorporate this change into the mainstream
sources, the copyright issue would have to be resolved
as described above.

> What you are saying is that you never can by the source
> through the GPL therefore you are not covered by it.
> Interesting point.

No no, that's not quite right. The *copyright holder* does
not need a license to use their own stuff. They can do
anything they like. In the case of ACT, we definitely need
a license to use other people's copyrighted software:

  1. The components where the FSF holds the copyright
  2. The components where some third party (e.g. FSU) holds
     the copyright

and we rely on the GPL for this access. For units to which
ACT holds the copyright, we certainly need no license at
all!

> but it only takes one other contributor to say that their
> code fix which you incorporated was released under the
> GPL for you to be bound by it.

As I made clear above, we would never incorporate changes
without resolving the copyright issue as above. Note that
in the case of assignments, we would use the FSF assignment
form which is an unusual one, because it constrains the
recipient of the assignment to continue distribution under
the GPL.

Suppose for example, you right 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?
Yup, but this kind of assignment is not uncommon (most
authors have to execute such assignments to their
publishers for example).

The FSF assignment, which ACT would also use, has two
important extra conditions:

1. It constrains the assignee (FSF or ACT) to always
release future modifications and versions under the GPL.

2. It grants an unlimited license back to the assignor

> ALL versions of GNAT are GPL and they always will be,
> Richard Stallman probably has a quad of legal cash
> waiting for the first commercial enterprise to abuse the
> GPL, as that would set the precedent.

Richard Stallman would only have legal standing if we
did something inappropriate with an FSF copyrighted
component, and even there it would not be Richard Stallman,
but rather the FSF that had standing.

The GPL itself is a license which is a contract between
two parties. There are only two kinds of legal redress
available, violations of the contract under contract law,
which of course can only involve the parties to the
contract, and copyright violations, which can only
involve the copyright holder.

If FSF is neither a party to the contract, nor the
copyright holder, then they are not an interested party.
Richard Stallman might or might not give his opinion
on the appropriate interpretation of the GPL, and might
for example be an expert witness on one side or the other
in any legal proceeding, but would not otherwise have
standing.

I often find this is a confusion, people somehow think that
any instance of the GPL involves the FSF. This of course
is not the case. The GPL is just a license which anyone
is free to use in any situation they like.

> You can no more take GNAT back, that Larry Walls, Linus
> Torvalds and Richard Stallman could take back perl,
> linux, or emacs.

Well you are probably right from a practical point of view,
but the point is that nothing would legally prevent these
authors from trying to make a proprietary version of their
work. Surely they would fail in the attempt.


> > When you get a licensed product from Microsoft, you
> > know perfectly well that they still own the program and
> > can do anything they like with it.
>
> So you have to use Microsoft as an example to make
> yourself look good in the GPL world ?

That's an odd statement. This has nothing to do with
looking good, it has to do with legal requirements of
the GPL, which is what we are discussing.

The point here is that historically, lawyers for large
companies have often been very suspicious of the GPL,
because they think something funny is going on (indeed
this message which I am responding too makes an attempt
to reinforce this incorrect viewpoint).

Realizing that the GPL is just a license, no different
in fundamental legal structure form the licenses that
Microsoft grants is very helpful, because it makes large
companies see that there is nothing to be afraid of in
using GPL'ed software. We have spent a lot of time working
with large companies to alleviate concerns of this kind.

> > Well there is *nothing* unusual about the GPL in this
> > regard, it is simply a limited license giving the
> > recipient of the license certain limited rights to use
> > the copyrighted works.

> The terms copyleft

Actually this is not a technical term, but just a popular
one. It is probably unfortunate since it has tended to
create the impression that GPL'ed software is not
copyrighted, but rather exists in some strange legal
state different from copyright. Note that the GPL itself
(quite deliberately) does NOT use the term copyleft.

> and its simply a licence as a Rolls Royce and a Lada
> are cars.

Now *there* we can agree. The Rolls Royce and the Lada
are of course just cars, but they are cars you would like
to have if you have the choice.

The GPL is indeed a Rolls-Royce of licenses from the point
of view of the licensor, and helping companies to realize
that this is the case, and helping them to realize that
the GPL is highly desirable from their point of view is
what this is all about.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[root]

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>In article <36E25778.C056829@chocolatesaltyballs.com>,
> root <white@chocolatesaltyballs.com> wrote:
>
>Well a lot of confusion and misunderstanding here, so it
>is a useful opportunity to clarify things:

Well, obviously a statement intended to dumb down, assume the high ground and set things up nicely for what's to follow....

>> because if one of those contributors says NO, end of
>> story.
>
>Well it is worse than this if you think about it. 
>What if
>someone makes a fix that is not under the GPL, then you
>have a derivative work that cannot be distributed without
>the explicit permission of both copyright holders (because
>of course the GPL one one part does not permit you to
>distribute other things not covered by the GPL). Note that
>in this case the holder of the copyright on the non-GPL'ed
>modification cannot distribute the combined work, since
>the GPL prevents this.

This example is plain wrong. The person can't "fix" a GPL work unless the person agrees to the GPL terms (section 5). So " a fix that is not under the GPL" is just not going to see the light of day!

5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. 

And once the person accept the GPL terms they can't release it to others under any licence more restrictive than the GPL (end para of section 2.)

"...when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it." 

ACT has copyright on parts of GNAT. I take your point that ACT is not bound by the GPL on those parts, however many other people/organisations have contributed to GNAT and the GPL is there to make sure that such works are not made proprietary.

>If ACT or some other entity had decided to maintain GNAT
>on a proprietary basis (the GPL makes this trickier but
>by no means impossible), then that would have been too bad
>but not a contract violation.

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?!?  )

>I constantly run into people who think that ACT is somehow,
>by someone, or something, *required* to make public

Never said you were required to release, just said if you did it would have to be GPL, and until you buy copyright ownership of the complete source tree it stays that way (although this wasn't my origin premise).

>"It is the policy of Ada Core Technologies, and ACT/EUrope,
>that GNAT and its associated tool set will continue to be
>distributed under the GPL (or GGPL) and that public
>versions will be released from time to time that reflect
>the complete state of the technology in open source form."

This is the crux, the commercial versions are as "public" as the public versions, they are as public as they are ever going to be. They are GPL :) the technology is already open source.  While I don't agree with your alpha/beta testing policy (it's your funeral to think you wouldn't get there quicker with an open daily CVS).  To release a stable version and not at the same time release the functional identical public version is not in the spirit of the GPL.  Which you haven't done yet, so I'm not accusing. Don't get offended either, you leave yourself open to such cynicism, with two GPL releases, one of which is called commercial with implied functional difference, that only paying customers can independently verify. 

>> If I or anyone who came by the GNAT source through the
>> GPL modified it and released it to others it would have
>> to be GPL as stated in section 4 and 5.
>
>If you have a legitimate license (the GPL in this case),
>you can certainly modify it and distribute the modification
>in any form allowed by the GPL (your modification does not
>have to be under the GPL, it can be under a more liberal
>license, e.g. be in the public domain, that is up to you).

Sorry but you've just quoted me and then repeated me! (Although its section 2 not 4). Anything more relaxed is virtually giving it away without licence, anything more restrictive is prohibited by the GPL. I.e. either give it away, and forget licence discussion or release it under the GPL.

>> What you are saying is that you never can[came] by the source
>> through the GPL therefore you are not covered by it.
>> Interesting point.
>
>No no, that's not quite right. The *copyright holder* does
>not need a license to use their own stuff. They can do
>anything they like. In the case of ACT, we definitely need
>a license to use other people's copyrighted software:

Gratefully noted. An insight into GPL workings, and a GPL work made of many different copyrights :)

>Suppose for example, you right 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 :).

>I often find this is a confusion, people somehow think that
>any instance of the GPL involves the FSF. This of course
>is not the case. The GPL is just a license which anyone
>is free to use in any situation they like.

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.

>> You can no more take GNAT back, that Larry Walls, Linus
>> Torvalds and Richard Stallman could take back perl,
>> linux, or emacs.
>
>Well you are probably right from a practical point of view,
>but the point is that nothing would legally prevent these
>authors from trying to make a proprietary version of their
>work. Surely they would fail in the attempt.

Thanks for one concession. ACT could say tomorrow "it is our commercial policy to nolonger release future versions of GNAT under the GPL", and they'd fail, because of the GPL, because that's its intent.

>> The terms copyleft
>
>Actually this is not a technical term, but just a popular
>one. It is probably unfortunate since it has tended to
>create the impression that GPL'ed software is not
>copyrighted, but rather exists in some strange legal
>state different from copyright. Note that the GPL itself
>(quite deliberately) does NOT use the term copyleft.

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.

>The GPL is indeed a Rolls-Royce of licenses from the point
>of view of the licensor, and helping companies to realize
>that this is the case, and helping them to realize that
>the GPL is highly desirable from their point of view is
>what this is all about.

That might be your goal, but mine was just to determine that GNAT is and all future versions will always be GPL open source. The dangers of an individual or organisation's copyright remaining within the GPL is a good argument for having more than one party involved in development, if it is truly open source and others are contributing their efforts.  

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.

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

Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[dewar]

Incidentally a bit of history may provide useful
perspective here. I know that many readers are fully
familiar with this, but we always have new readers who
have discovered Ada more recently who don't always know
the history (and of course it is great to see new people
coming into the Ada fold).

I personally have fought the fight to get open source
software out for Ada from the start, well starting in the
early 80's.

At NYU, we wrote NYU Ada/Ed, the first validated
Ada translator first in SETL, and then
later translated into C.

We had a big struggle to get
the sources of this out. The DoD which was funding
as at the time retained some data rights and wanted
to try to make money (more accurately to get some of
the money they had spent back) by selling the program
through the national technical information service.

Eventually we did succeed in releasing the sources, but
it was really too late to be useful.

Later in the 80's I made several trips down to Washington
trying to interest DARPA in funding a free software Ada 83
compiler. I got some expression of interest, but basically
DARPA was not that interested in Ada, and things never got
anywhere.

I considered it crucial for Ada's long term success that
we have open source versions available for use in
universities, but until Ada 95 came along I just could not
convince anyone else that this was important.

I spread the gospel of the importance of a free software
approach to Ada 95 to Chris Anderson, and from my input,
and from the input of many others, it was Chris who was
finally persuaded that this made sense.

The contract between the DoD and NYU for GNAT was rather
amazing. Following my specific recommendations, it required
the use of the GPL and LGPL (and indeed the entire text of
the GPL is in the contract), and it also requires
assignment of the copyright to FSF (I explained at the time
why I thought it was important to get the copyright free of
NYU, since some people at NYU, as at any other university,
are more interested in making money off patents and
copyrighted software than in promulgating free software.
I knew that an assignment to the FSF would protect the
continued free status, whatever NYU decided it wanted to
do.)

That's a rather *amazing* contract, and in retrospect,
Chris was surprised that she succeeded in getting it past
the legal and procurement scrutiny in the DoD. In fact I
think it is a tremendous achievment, and I am not sure
anyone else other than Chris could have managed it.

The next big hurdle was the other Ada vendors. Chris
thought they would be pleased at this development since it
was clear to her it would aid the long term goals of Ada,
but in fact several vendors went ballistic, since they
felt that GNAT threatened their markets. Note that not all
vendors felt this way, but some big important ones did,
enough to make a serious problem (I will not name names
at this stage, it is water under the bridge after all!)

The whole project hung in the balance, but squeaked through
by taking two steps:

  1) eliminating validation

  2) adding some siderals to the contract that eliminated
     funding for several features, enough so that the
     result could be seen to be crippled (the list included
     fixed point and subunits, and some other stuff I have
     forgotten).

So things forged ahead. The validation did not really
matter, although it is ironic that when it came to awarding
the contract for the academic compiler, the main reason
that Mike Feldman's proposal for a GNAT based solution was
turned down was the lack of validation! He had a letter of
commitment from ACT which existed by that time, of the
intent to validate, but was told that ACT was not a
sufficiently credible company to ensure validation -- a bit
ironic as ACT is still the only company to have achieved
full 100% validations of the core and all annexes :-)

(by the way Mike [Feldman] if you read this and want to
correct or elaborate, feel free!)

As for the siderals, we found a way around this. Both I and
Ed Schonberg had sabbaticals due at NYU, and we took them
during the project. Instead of rushing off to some far away
land and thinking high academic thoughts, as is often done
during sabbaticals, we stayed at NYU, and worked on the
missing features. Since NYU, and not the DoD, was paying
our salaries, no one could complain that DoD money was
being used for prohibited features, and that is how GNAT
came to be 100% complete, despite the insistence of other
vendors in these siderals in the contract!

The GNAT contract ended after four years (the total by the
way was about $3 million during this period, a small
fraction of the total money that the DoD had spent in
direct and indirect subsidy of other Ada efforts
previously).

That's when ACT was formed. The cast of characters was
pretty much unchanged from the NYU days, and in many
respects the spirit of the project continued unchanged.

The three changes were

  1) The acquisition of serious paying customers, with SGI
  playing a crucial role in embracing GNAT and its open
  source basis early on.

  2) A serious commitment to validation, which had been
  prohibited during the period of the NYU contract.

  3) A considerable increase in the scale of the project,
  supported by these paying customers. At NYU, we had
  the equivalent of 6-8 full time people, and ACT and
  ACTE now have more than double this number.

As a result, development has continued without any more
expenditure of tax payers money, and a nice synergy has
arisen between the paying customers, who get a supported
commercial product that they can use in major projects,
and the users of the public version, who provide a large
testing community, and help smoke out problems and also to
suggest improvements, many of which suggestions have been
adopted in successive versions of GNAT.

We have continued to maintain the practice started at NYU
of building public binary versions. Although of course the
sources are fully available, for many users it is important
to have prebuilt binary versions, hopefully nicely packaged
for easy installation. Building and preparing these public
release versions is certainly not zero effort, but they
have had a significant role in increasing the spread and
use of Ada, a goal that ACT (and I personally) is (am)
committed to pursuing.

Robert Dewar






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Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[Tom Moran]

This history is very helpful.  Thank you.

Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[dennison]

In article <7c2c11$ila$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> Incidentally a bit of history may provide useful
> perspective here. I know that many readers are fully

> So things forged ahead. The validation did not really
> matter, although it is ironic that when it came to awarding
> the contract for the academic compiler, the main reason
> that Mike Feldman's proposal for a GNAT based solution was
> turned down was the lack of validation! He had a letter of

I'm glad you cleared that up. I had heard talk of that a few years back, but
I had gathered the "acedemic compiler" contract was the contract that Gnat
was developed under, not some separate contract that came along later, and
that Mike had lost with a bid based on Ada-Ed. Boy was I confused!

Out of curiosity, were there any other "bids" on the gnat contract, or was
it just written with NYU in mind?

T.E.D.

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Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[robert_dewar]

In article <7c3dpp$f1g$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dennison@telepath.com wrote:

> I'm glad you cleared that up. I had heard talk of that a
> few years back, but I had gathered the "acedemic
> compiler" contract was the contract that Gnat was
> developed under, not some separate contract that came
> along later, and that Mike had lost with a bid based on
> Ada-Ed. Boy was I confused!

The academic compiler contract was completely separate from
GNAT except that one bid involved GNAT (from Mike), and
indeed there was an expectation early on that Metroworks
might bid based on GNAT, but Metroworks got cold feet over
GPL issues [they did not want to open source their stuff]
(as best I understand what happened).

There were at least two other bids, and the contract (for
a student compiler for the PC and for the Mac) went to
Intermetrics/Aonix, and is the basis for the current Object
Ada product on the PC.

To give a bit more perspective, we were getting pretty loud
signals that AJPO did not want to put any more government
money into GNAT at that point (there appeared to be
continuing concern with competition with other vendors).
I even had a discussion with one high up official (who I
will not name) in AJPO who got very worried that GNAT might
be validated, and asked me how this could be prevented (!)

> Out of curiosity, were there any other "bids" on the gnat
> contract, or was it just written with NYU in mind?

There were no other bids, and I think it may have been
sole-sourced -- note that we were in a unique position
since this was part of the gcc system, and NYU was the
official maintainer of gcc. Indeed without this
relationship the initial development of GNAT would have
been much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[Arthur Evans Jr]

In article <7c2c11$ila$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> Incidentally a bit of history may provide useful perspective here. I
> know that many readers are fully familiar with this, but we always
> have new readers who have discovered Ada more recently who don't
> always know the history (and of course it is great to see new people
> coming into the Ada fold).

Thanks, Robert, for this important contribution.

> I spread the gospel of the importance of a free software approach to
> Ada 95 to Chris Anderson, and from my input, and from the input of
> many others, it was Chris who was finally persuaded that this made
> sense.

 [snip]

> That's a rather *amazing* contract, and in retrospect, Chris was
> surprised that she succeeded in getting it past the legal and
> procurement scrutiny in the DoD. In fact I think it is a tremendous
> achievment, and I am not sure anyone else other than Chris could have
> managed it.

The intended audience of Robert's note probably doesn't recognize
Chris's name.  She was Project Director of the DoD-funded project that
upgraded the Ada-83 standard to Ada-95.  All concerned with the project
agreed that Chris's commitment to the project and deep understanding of
DoD ways were essential to the success of what we did.  The Ada
community owes her an immense vote of thanks, and it's my pleasure to
acknowledge her publicly here.

Art Evans

Arthur Evans Jr
Ada Consulting

Make the obvious change to my address to reply to me.

Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))

[dennison]

In article <ev_remove_this_ans-1103990847580001@192.168.1.254>,
  ev_remove_this_ans@evans.pgh.pa.us (Arthur Evans Jr) wrote:

> The intended audience of Robert's note probably doesn't recognize
> Chris's name.  She was Project Director of the DoD-funded project that
> upgraded the Ada-83 standard to Ada-95.  All concerned with the project
> agreed that Chris's commitment to the project and deep understanding of
> DoD ways were essential to the success of what we did.  The Ada
> community owes her an immense vote of thanks, and it's my pleasure to
> acknowledge her publicly here.

I believe there's a picture of her and a little blurb about her in the
"rogue's gallery" at adahome.

T.E.D.

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

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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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[SpamSpamSpam]

dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> (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!)
>

I am using a feature in Netscape called "auto-wrap" ( thismodern tech. is
great :) so I don't see the size of the line
as its para from my view. But I have inserted hard returns
as requested.


> In
> fact ACT would not be willing to assign the copyrights
> except using the FSF form of assignment.
>

A "currently willing" caveat would fit well here as you're a
company.Employees come and go, people sell shares and company policy
changes according to market need.

> 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

So I stand in court, but I'd be funded by those with a concernfor open
source and GPL. So who's REALLY bringing the case ?
me or the open source community ?

> > 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 your sheer arrogance visible in nearly every post amusesme.  The true
intent is stated the preamble in a manner the plain
english society would be proud of.

"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General
Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share
and change free software--to make sure the software is free for
all its users."

The term "copyleft" was, I believe, intended to convey the intent
of GPL detailed in plain english in the preamble. You don't
need briefings from corporate lawyers to understand the intent (
even if the remaining "copyright" rights escaped you :)

Thats the crux of these posts and discussion of the nature of the
commercial and public versions of GPL GNAT and the fact that
you seek to prevent the copy and redistribution of a GPL version
called 3.11b2, stating first that its not based on 3.11p then that
they are both GPL but not the same, then that they atleast differ
in version header and then that they only differ in version headers.
If you want to concentrate/distract on my lack of knowledge of
the finer points of  the GPL, fine. After many posts I've got
from you, by any means, a statement that 3.11b2 is 3.11p.

> and then complaining at
> us that we somehow are not following it,

Not complaining, just seeking clarification regards the differencesin
"commercial" and "public" versions of GNAT, and resolving
how you get to the position of saying a GPL work is not for
redistribution because its commercial.

> 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.

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.

> 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!)

Again funny, when I stated that you were one of the few
commericalmaintainers of GPL source, you told me I didn't know what was
going
on.

> > 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!

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.  Calling a GPL work
"commerical", restricting its redistribution 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.

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[robert_dewar]

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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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Chris Morgan]

SpamSpamSpam <spam@spam.com> writes:

> I am using a feature in Netscape called "auto-wrap" ( thismodern tech. is
> great :) so I don't see the size of the line
> as its para from my view. But I have inserted hard returns
> as requested.

Not all newsreaders (even modern ones) auto-wrap intelligently on word
boundaries, so thismodern tech. is not great, it's best with some
cooperation from the users.

> A "currently willing" caveat would fit well here as you're a
> company.Employees come and go, people sell shares and company policy
> changes according to market need.

I think you'll find ACT is unusually focussed and the employees are
unlikely to allow it to be assimilated.

[SNIP]
> > Well I am always amused by people proclaiming that they
> > know the true intent of the GPL,
> 
> And your sheer arrogance visible in nearly every post amusesme.  The true
> intent is stated the preamble in a manner the plain
> english society would be proud of.
> 
> "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
> freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General
> Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share
> and change free software--to make sure the software is free for
> all its users."

I think arguing by reference to the preamble or the GNU manifesto is
tempting but doomed to failure. RMS had very lofty goals when he wrote
them, but he was already old and wise enough to pay enough attention
to the details (i.e. the detailed statements of the GPL) to make a
workable pragmatic system of licensing and distribution. We have had
other posters complaining about perceived mismatches between the
manifesto and the license, but really they carry no weight, the GPL is
all we really have to go on (unless you have some software which is
licensed by "please abide by the manifesto").

> 
> The term "copyleft" was, I believe, intended to convey the intent
> of GPL detailed in plain english in the preamble. You don't
> need briefings from corporate lawyers to understand the intent (
> even if the remaining "copyright" rights escaped you :)

The intent is one thing, but the actual position is controlled by the
GPL. 

> 
> Thats the crux of these posts and discussion of the nature of the
> commercial and public versions of GPL GNAT and the fact that
> you seek to prevent the copy and redistribution of a GPL version
> called 3.11b2, stating first that its not based on 3.11p then that
> they are both GPL but not the same, then that they atleast differ
> in version header and then that they only differ in version headers.
> If you want to concentrate/distract on my lack of knowledge of
> the finer points of  the GPL, fine. After many posts I've got
> from you, by any means, a statement that 3.11b2 is 3.11p.

The public version is never the same as the latest commercial
version. If you have a support contract you can get newer versions of
GNAT including special experimental fixes and so on immediately after
they arrive in the source tree - possibly way too soon. By the time
the unsupported users such as myself get a new version of GNAT, it is
already an old version for the supported users as each time it bit
someone ACT fixed it under paid contract until it stabilised nicely
and looked like something even the great unwashed (again, i.e. me)
could use productively. That lag is approved by the FSF. Maybe not
applauded whole-heartedly by people like egcs and the Linux kernel
team, but not a violation.

> 
> > and then complaining at
> > us that we somehow are not following it,
> 
> Not complaining, just seeking clarification regards the differencesin
> "commercial" and "public" versions of GNAT, and resolving
> how you get to the position of saying a GPL work is not for
> redistribution because its commercial.

i.e. because its usable with commercial full-time support only

The other way of phrasing it is "because it's not tested, not proven,
not stable, just not ready".

> 
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

This is true. Many moons ago I was a supported user and received a
wavefront compiler. Someone else was interested in it and we discussed
the matter by email. I concluded I had the right to give it to him,
but that I wouldn't at that time - there is the responsibility to the
community to be balanced with the rights of one user. Since wavefronts
are (I think) just automatic output of ACT's quality control system
(proof that it builds essentially) they don't seem very valuable
compared to the risk of them getting out onto the Internet and causing
a huge flurry of pointless emails and newsgroup postings. When a
release is frozen but not available because it's brethren on other
platforms (e.g. WinNT) are still having problems, e.g. install wizards,
it would be tempting for me to ask for a new version from someone who
was supported. In fact I bet a few of these releases have been passed
around, but it seems the recipients have had the sense to keep quiet
about it. In my case I haven't got to the bleeding edge of GNAT tools
where I _needed_ the newest one for a long long time (3-4 years).

[SNIP]
> > > 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!
> 
> 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.  Calling a GPL work
> "commerical", restricting its redistribution 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.

Well, many of the supported users post here from time to time, and
from my experience the situation is _precisely_ as Prof. Dewar
says. The commercially supported people generally work from the latest
commercial version. The only difference between these and the public
versions is that if a commercial one breaks they will fix it for
you. Think of them as release candidates and think of the commercial
users as late beta testers (wavefront users are alpha/beta
testers). Several release candidates can occur within one broad
release (3.11b2 implies versioning within 3.11). When a release
candidate works on all platforms, it's good enough to be made
public. They swap in a different version number, build the compiler
from scratch and make the release. Thus technically speaking it's not
the same build as any of the commercial versions (sum gnatmake is
different) but from the users point of view it's every bit as good as
the release candidate that shares the same source profile.

In case you're wondering what the point of this explanation is, I
should add that when I was a supported user, the Ada user group in our
company suggested it would be prudent to simply stick to the public
releases on the grounds that we wanted the most stable
versions. Prof. Dewar thinks that attitude is taking things too far,
but it certainly didn't seem to us that the commercial releases
contained any goodies that we should grab asap. It was all about
defence in depth - use the public one, if that breaks get the latest
commercial release and see if ACT have solved the problem, if not ask
them to fix it and get a wavefront with the fix. Once the fix is
firmly in place move back to the most stable version available
containing the fix (I'm talking about production compilers
here). Naturally I always had the very latest version I could lay my
hands on in my own area, and now I'm unsupported I do miss the ability
to go and get the commercial releases, but I know that they are not
the unqualified advantage you seem to think.

Cheers,

Chris

-- 
Chris Morgan <mihalis at ix.netcom.com                http://mihalis.net
 "We're going to start selling Linux to single-party users very
 soon. Q: It's going to be on the menu? A: Yes. You'll go to Dell, 
 pull down "operating system," and click "Linux."         - Michael Dell

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <876789s6or.fsf@mihalis.ix.netcom.com>,
  Chris Morgan <mihalis@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> In case you're wondering what the point of this
> explanation is, I should add that when I was a supported
> user, the Ada user group in our
> company suggested it would be prudent to simply stick to
> the public releases on the grounds that we wanted the
> most stable versions.

Just to clarify things here. The most recent commercial
release is almost always the same source base as the
public release. For example, the current commercial release
is 3.11b2, which is the commercial release to which 3.11p
corresponds.

Generally we expect our customers to be using 3.11b2, since
this is the latest stable commercial release. We advise
them to use 3.11b2 rather than 3.11p for several reasons:

1. THe 3.11b2 comes from us. When you get 3.11p from some
   public site, you really don't know what you are getting,
   and neither do we, we obviously can't guarantee what is
   out there is the same as what we put out. It probably is
   but we have no control and no assurance of this.

2. The commercial version is the one which we support and
   for which we provide a guarantee. For example we will
   provide formal Y2K certification for 3.11b2, but we
   never make any such guarantees for the public system.

Now of course a number of our customers are using later
versions. We don't make these automatically available
(Chris in fact did NOT always have his hands on the latest
version!) We only make them available if in the judgment
of both ACT and the customer, it makes sense to move to
what we call a "wavefront version", identified by a w in
the version number, as in 3.12w, to fix a specific problem.

Where possible, both ACT and most customers prefer to work
around problems than to get new compiler versions, but the
development of GNAT is very rapid, and already the 3.12w
wavefront contains not only a large number of fixes, but
also some very important new functionality, developed for,
and in some cases funded by, customers, and of course these
customers get access to this wavefront version to test out
these new capabilities (an example is the -gnatR feature
that I highlighted the other day).

The features file for 3.12w already contains about 130
lines listing some 40-50 new features and fixes.

We are working towards getting this new level of the
technology releasable as fast as possible. First we will
make a 3.12a release for our customers, and then if there
are no glitches, make a corresponding 3.12p. if there are
minor glitches, we will fix them first. Note that although
some customers move to wavefronts rapidly, many have a
(very reasonable) policy of only looking at official
releases, so when we announce 3.12a, we get a lot of
people looking at it in a short time. If we do find
glitches we will make a 3.12a1, 3.12a2 etc and iterate
(that's why we arrived at 3.11b2) before we make the
public release.

Finally I note that Chris refers to EGCS and Linux. IN fact
the development situation for these projects is much the
same as in the GNAT case, with regard to major
developments.

Cygnus is doing major work on gcc on its internal tree.
You won't know the details unless you are a Cygnus customer
under an appropriate non-disclosure agreement. They will
synchronize these changes with EGCS at an appropriate
point. Similarly within redhat and the other Linux
companies all sorts of major internal development is
taking place that has not seen the light of day yet.

What is missing in the GNAT case is more active playing and
contributing with/to the public versions. Note that Marcus
Kuhn and his band of Linux enthusiasts are trying to do
something about this, and we are working with them to
figure out how to make this work smoothly.

We are also working out how to integrate GNAT into the
EGCS release, and perhaps this will also encourage that
kind of activity.

I don't mean to say there is NO useful work going on, not
at all, Jerry's announcement this morning for example is
a great case of important volunteer contributions, and
there are many others. Everyone is in favor of seeing a
more vital activity there!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[Chris Morgan]

dewar@gnat.com writes:

> Now of course a number of our customers are using later
> versions. We don't make these automatically available
> (Chris in fact did NOT always have his hands on the latest
> version!) We only make them available if in the judgment
> of both ACT and the customer, it makes sense to move to
> what we call a "wavefront version", identified by a w in
> the version number, as in 3.12w, to fix a specific problem.

True. I did get a wavefront once or twice though and used it myself
for quite a while before the next numbered version. I also had a lot
of paperwork to do before changing which compiler the average
developer was supposed to do which was good discipline but tedious. 

> Finally I note that Chris refers to EGCS and Linux. IN fact
> the development situation for these projects is much the
> same as in the GNAT case, with regard to major
> developments.
> 
> Cygnus is doing major work on gcc on its internal tree.
> You won't know the details unless you are a Cygnus customer
> under an appropriate non-disclosure agreement. They will
> synchronize these changes with EGCS at an appropriate
> point. Similarly within redhat and the other Linux
> companies all sorts of major internal development is
> taking place that has not seen the light of day yet.

I'm not familiar with the precise details, but at least some of the
open source projects have open cvs trees (typically read-only to
non-members). In particular though egcs/=cygnus[1] and Linux
kernel/=RedHat and although you are right generally I think the
projects I mentioned are a little bit more open than ACT. I don't mean
this in the negative sense at all and I don't want to get into the
"Cathedral/Bazaar" argument (except to say I'm not fond of the FSF
bashing that has gone on and not at all convinced that ESR is
obviously a better advocate of free/open source than RMS).

[1]Prof. Dewar was insistent that this is true and often not
recognized publically. I guess it's the "major developments" bit that
is key here - perhaps the open informal teams are getting left behind
by heretofore private work I don't know about, it's entirely possible.

Chris
-- 
Chris Morgan <mihalis at ix.netcom.com                http://mihalis.net
 "We're going to start selling Linux to single-party users very
 soon. Q: It's going to be on the menu? A: Yes. You'll go to Dell, 
 pull down "operating system," and click "Linux."         - Michael Dell

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[dewar]

In article <87lnh52i3d.fsf@mihalis.ix.netcom.com>,
  Chris Morgan <mihalis@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> [1]Prof. Dewar was insistent that this is true and often
> not recognized publically. I guess it's the "major
> developments" bit that is key here - perhaps the open
> informal teams are getting left behind by heretofore
> private work I don't know about, it's entirely possible.

Well you certainly can't know about the internal Cygnus
work if you have not signed a non-disclosure, and even then
they often hold their road maps quite closely even with
respect to their major customers.

The important thing to realize is that EGCS is NOT a Cygnus
project. It is independent at this stage. Yes, Cygnus has
a lot of influence, and several people on the EGCS board
are from Cygnus, and Cygnus also invests substantial
resources in keeping EGCS synchronized to some extent with
their internal tree.

But major development work that goes on in the internal
tree is not reflected day to day in the EGCS tree, and
indeed you would not want it to be in my opinion, and the
Cygnus operating procedure seems quite reasonable.

Same thing with GDB, the GDB 5.0 tree that is internal to
Cygnus is most certainly not externally visible, and
details of this tree are released only to their closest
large customers. Again, this seems entirely reasonable
to me!

As for Redhat and Linux, the same kind of relationship
exists between the internal Redhat development and the
externally visible version of Linux. In that case we know
a little more about what is going on inside, from news
stories, for example, the development of the new journaling
file system which is reportedly going on.

The fact of the matter is that major developments require
a lot of synchronized design and planning, and are just not
susceptible to the approach of having lots of people
contributing independently.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[David Botton]

root wrote:
> Note the use of the "if" at the start. Are you claiming literal
> ownership of GNAT?

I think Robert Dewar was referring to those parts of GNAT which were
written by ACT. There is no reason why he could not withhold further
development of these portions or re-release those portions as separate
packages not under the GPL.

> ALL versions of GNAT are GPL and they always will be,

> You can no more take GNAT back, that Larry Walls, Linus Torvalds and
> Richard Stallman could take back perl, linux, or emacs.

That may be true, but the GPL does not say that the software must be
released to the public. There are many drivers for linux and other
patches to the kernel that are not GPL and have all the same
restrictions as more "traditional" non-GPL software.

As an illustration, the program PINE branched about a year ago in to a
GPL version and a non-GPL version. GNAT as it is today can not be taken
away, but that doesn't mean that future work has to be made public or
under the GPL.

> 
> > When you get a licensed product from Microsoft, you know
> > perfectly well that they still own the program and can do
> > anything they like with it.
> 
> So you have to use Microsoft as an example to make yourself look good in
> the GPL world ?

No, Robert Dewar was making it clear the the Microsoft EULA and the Free
Software Foundation GPL are the same category of document, a license
agreement.

> The terms copyleft, and its simply a licence as a Rolls Royce and a Lada
> are cars.

Is copyleft a legal term? I thought it was slang for the copyrighted
software that used copyright law to keep information public instead of
private. I'll look it up.

David Botton

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[robert_dewar]

In article <36E294AB.86AFBA58@Botton.com>,
  David Botton <David@Botton.com> wrote:

> I think Robert Dewar was referring to those parts of GNAT
> which were written by ACT. There is no reason why he
> could not withhold further development of these portions
> or re-release those portions as separate packages not
> under the GPL.

Well not "he" (I don't hold the copyrights) but rather ACT.
Of course as I have emphasized, ACT is a 100% open source
committed company, and we fully intend to make all our
current and future technology available under the GPL in
open source form.

Part of the reason I emphasize the legal situation here is
that the open software community needs to understand that
this kind of proprietarization is possible, and to keep a
close watch on it, and yell loudly where appropriate!

> As an illustration, the program PINE branched about a
> year ago in to a GPL version and a non-GPL version. GNAT
> as it is today can not be taken away, but that doesn't
> mean that future work has to be made public or under the
> GPL.

This is precisely the sort of thing I am concerned about.
Open source software at many companies is constantly under
pressure from a more conventional (e.g. venture capital)
point of view that the way to make money on free software
is to make it proprietary.

At ACT, we have no investors to keep happy. The only
investment in ACT were from its participants (officers
working for free for a while, some small loans from
officers, and a few deferred paychecks early on, other
than that we ran from revenue). At this stage, ACT has
been on a firm financial footing for quite a while, with
all its bills paid, the payroll met on time, and money
in the bank. We are not getting Bill-Gates style
rich, or even typical-broker-on-wall-street rich, but we
are doing fine, and most importantly we are not beholden to
investors with more interest in money than in Ada.

We plan incidentally to release a financial report at the
end of the calendar year. We don't have to do this, since
we are a private company, but we think the Ada community
will be pleased to know that a company with 100% Ada
orientation can be financially viable.

> Is copyleft a legal term?

no, defintely not!

> I thought it was slang for the copyrighted software that
> used copyright law to keep information public instead of
> private. I'll look it up.

yes! that's right, and in my experience the term has caused
quite a bit of confusion, so we never use it.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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GNAT Field Test scope (was SGI GNAT Question)

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com>, SpamSpamSpam <spam@spam.com> writes:

> 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. Having  run a
> GNU/linux system for 3 years, I like many others are use to "feature-rich"
> pre-releases.

Of course none of those paying customers need to use those field test
versions, unless they are waiting for a particular fix.  Having had the
opportunity to field test various software for 20 years now, I know I
only want to participate in such activities when there is a particular
reason -- not just for general purposes.

Field test is just a part of qualifying a new software release.  In
many cases internal target testing is more valuable. Of course ACT is
accepting bug reports all the time, so they already have a lot of feedback
from paying customers and others regarding the general state of affairs.
Presumably they even build regression tests.

Unless you see particular regressions that have been released in GNAT,
it would seem they have enough field test sites already.  Adding more
sites could slow down the process, and if there is no benefit obtained
there is no reason to do it.

Larry Kilgallen

Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)

[David C. Hoos, Sr.]

In your lengthy message (which might have better been submitted to
chat@gnat.com), you didn't specify in which directory you were when you
issued the various commands.

However, I'll tell you how I build programs on SGI platforms of a similar
kind, and with similar library structures.

Some details of my work differ, so I'm only 99.9 % sure about the -n32
details.  We must use -o32 because we depend on some third-party libraries
with o32 objects, and we deal with that by editing the specs file which can
be located using the gcc -v command.

Also, since I edit and do test compiles from within Emacs, I use Emacs
Ada-mode project files as described in the Gnat User's Guide.

I also use a Makefile to "remember" the various options and commands, but
I'll show how I would do it manually.

When I want to build an executable (using your directory names) I cd to the
linklib directory, and issue:

gnatmake -i -m \
-I/src/common \
-I/src/models/model_1 \
-I/src/models/model_2 \
-I/src/models/model_3 \
-o <main-unit-name> \
<main-unit-name> \
-cargs -g -O0 -n32 \
-largs -n32

This compiles any out-of-date objects _in the directory in which the source
code resides_, then binds and links.

The switches which you didn't mention, and their purposes are:

  -i  Excerpting from the Gnat User's Guide here -- In normal mode, gnatmake
compiles all object files and ALI files into the current directory. If
the -i switch is used, then instead object files and ALI files that already
exist are overwritten in place. This means that once a large project is
organized into separate directories in the desired manner, then gnatmake
will automatically maintain and update this organization. If no ALI files
are found on the Ada object path (section Search Paths and the Run-Time
Library (RTL)), the new object and ALI files are created in the directory
containing the source being compiled. If another organization is desired,
where objects and sources are kept in different directories, a useful
technique is to create dummy ALI files in the desired directories. When
detecting such a dummy file, gnatmake will be forced to recompile the
corresponding source file, and it will be put the resulting object and ALI
files in the directory where it found the dummy file.

My make file does a "touch <file-name>.ali" in the appropriate directory for
all compilation units (i.e. for each body file thet is not a separate, and
for each spec file which has no body), to create the "dummy" files to which
the Gnat User's Guide refers.

  -m  Again, excerpting from the Gnat User's Guide -- Specifies that the
minimum necessary amount of recompilation be performed. In this mode
(gnatmake) ignores time stamp differences when the only modifications to a
source file consist in adding/removing comments, empty lines, spaces or
tabs. This means that if you have changed the comments in a source file or
have simply reformatted it, using this switch will tell gnatmake not to
recompile files that depend on it (provided other sources on which these
files depend have undergone no semantic modifications).

We use this because some of our source files are created at build time by
gnatchop followed by gnatprep.  We have multiple platforms for which we
compile with platform-dependent code conditionally compiled with the aid of
gnatprep, and we still must use VADS, as well, so our source code repository
files are all .a files.  This means that source files are always generated
anew by passing through gnatchop (where we cannot a-priori determine the
filenames of gnat chop's output), then through gnatprep for the conditional
compilation.

The upshot is that all source files then have newer timestamps than the
corresponding .o and .ali files, but the -m switch never fails to do the
right thing in terms of only compiling files which have changed
semantically.

I generally only explicitly compile with gcc when I have edited a file with
Emacs, preferring to let gnatmake and my Makefile figure out the minimum
compilation required.

By using the project files to specify the dependencies and compile switches,
etc., for each directory, I insure that all files compiled from within Emacs
will have been compiled with the same options which I specify in the
Makefile.

I know this has been long, but I hope it's helpful.

It's been about three months since I did SGI work with GNAT, but we were
using gnat-3.11b, and I've moved on to a new company, so I have noting but
my memory to go on.

Except for the -n32, however, This is typical of the way I do things on all
platforms using gnat.  I've used this technique on SGI, Alpha, Solaris
Linux, Win32, and DOS.

David C. Hoos, Sr.

GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[kvisko]

In article <MJ3xAGKZ#GA.252@pet.hiwaay.net>, "David says...
>
>In your lengthy message (which might have better been submitted to
>chat@gnat.com),

Why?

In Other language newsgroups, such as C/C++/Java, people all the time
ask questions in reference to using specific compilers such as
VC++, Borland , gcc, etc.. 

No one thinks of saying that each compiler users should have a separate mailing
list. If so, then those news groups will be almost empty.

I think with Ada, with hardly any interest in it from the general public, to
have separate mailing lists for separate compilers is silly and counter
productive.

It is not like this news group is so busy. Even if it were, then this will
be a good thing, not a bad thing. 

We should have all Ada discussions here, GNAT or none GNAT. Having separate
mailing lists for Ada related stuff don't make sense to me given the small
Ada community size.

All public Ada discussions should be done here, on any topic, any one can 
simply ignore threads they are not interested in. Why are the Ada people
so up-tight about these things? While on other newsgroups no one makes
any point about these things?

May be have some convention of subject, where if the question is on GNAT,
it will say "GNAT: etc..", this way, people can easily not read it if they
do not want to.

kvisko

Re: GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <7bgmqm$82v@drn.newsguy.com>, kvisko@ writes:
> In article <MJ3xAGKZ#GA.252@pet.hiwaay.net>, "David says...
>>
>>In your lengthy message (which might have better been submitted to
>>chat@gnat.com),
> 
> Why?


I do not recall your original post, so I cannot comment on whether _it_
is more appropriate in a compiler-specific venue.  Many are, however.


> In Other language newsgroups, such as C/C++/Java, people all the time
> ask questions in reference to using specific compilers such as
> VC++, Borland , gcc, etc.. 


And in other languages one gets equivalence between integers and pointers
without asking for it :-).  Throughout the internet newsgroups, however,
there are various styles of operation.


> No one thinks of saying that each compiler users should have a separate mailing
> list. If so, then those news groups will be almost empty.
>> It is not like this news group is so busy. Even if it were, then this will
> be a good thing, not a bad thing. 
> 
> We should have all Ada discussions here, GNAT or none GNAT. Having separate
> mailing lists for Ada related stuff don't make sense to me given the small
> Ada community size.


The level of activity on comp.lang.ada is about right by my standards.
Padding it with information of marginal interest to some readers does
a disservice to those who have other things to do in their life.


> All public Ada discussions should be done here, on any topic, any one can 
> simply ignore threads they are not interested in. Why are the Ada people
> so up-tight about these things? While on other newsgroups no one makes
> any point about these things?


Many other newsgroups have their own ways of conducting business,
but they may not be ones with which you are familiar.


> May be have some convention of subject, where if the question is on GNAT,
> it will say "GNAT: etc..", this way, people can easily not read it if they
> do not want to.


No, I want to know things about GNAT that are of general interest, but
not the details of bug discussions, etc.


Larry Kilgallen

Re: GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[Samuel Mize]

kvisko@ wrote:
> In article <MJ3xAGKZ#GA.252@pet.hiwaay.net>, "David says...
>>
>>In your lengthy message (which might have better been submitted to
>>chat@gnat.com),
> 
> Why?

Simply because a lot of GNAT users pay attention to that mailing list,
but don't read comp.lang.ada.  He wasn't saying "you bad boy," he was
just pointing you at a resource where you were more likely to get help.


> All public Ada discussions should be done here, on any topic, any one can 
> simply ignore threads they are not interested in. Why are the Ada people
> so up-tight about these things?

Why are you characterizing someone as "up-tight about these things" on
the basis of two words in a post that was trying to help you, and
continuing the discussion you started, right here in this forum?

Best,
Sam Mize

-- 
Samuel Mize -- smize@imagin.net (home email) -- Team Ada
Fight Spam: see http://www.cauce.org/ \\\ Smert Spamonam

Re: GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[Mike Silva]

kvisko@ wrote in message <7bgmqm$82v@drn.newsguy.com>...
<...>
>In Other language newsgroups, such as C/C++/Java, people all the time
>ask questions in reference to using specific compilers such as
>VC++, Borland , gcc, etc..
<...>
>All public Ada discussions should be done here, on any topic, any one can
>simply ignore threads they are not interested in. Why are the Ada people
>so up-tight about these things? While on other newsgroups no one makes
>any point about these things?


Have you looked at comp.lang.c?  I think 80% of the messages there must boil
down to "It's not ANSI C, ask your question elsewhere".  That applies to
questions about compilers, libraries, you name it.  I think 50% of the
messages deal with the dreaded void main( void ) or // comments alone.  I
find c.l.a. has much more tolerance regarding the range of questions asked
(and I agree with your first sentence above).

BTW, I'm not bashing C (my primary language), just commenting on what I see
in c.l.c. vs. c.l.a.  Gee, I don't think I've ever seen anybody here say
"It's not ANSI Ada" :)

Mike

Re: GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[robert_dewar]

In article <7bgmqm$82v@drn.newsguy.com>,
  kvisko@ wrote:
> All public Ada discussions should be done here, on any
> topic, any one can simply ignore threads they are not
> interested in. Why are the Ada people so up-tight about
> these things? While on other newsgroups no one makes
> any point about these things?

I think the answer to that is quite easy, on other
newsgroups, most serious users of the language have
departed, and the newsgroups are of even less use to
serious users of the language than comp.lang.ada is.
CLA still has a large number of very knowledgable
Ada folks, including the original designers, who closely
follow the group.

Nevertheless, it is our experience that many serious users
of GNAT (including by the way most of the people at ACT
itself) do not find it worth while to take the time to
read CLA. There is still a lot of noise (off topic stuff,
advocacy on C vs Ada, various gripes etc) which serious
Ada users find unhelpful.

The chat@gnat.com list has been far more focussed, and has
an absolute minimum of off-topic noise (basically we don't
permit it there at all), and you will find many experienced
GNAT users who will be able to help with GNAT problems
there who do not read CLA.

Obviously there are exceptions, for example, David Hoos'
detailed post on how to use GNAT on the SGI. But note that
if the original question had been sent to chat@gnat.com,
there are many *current* users of both n32 and o32 GNAT who
could have also provided assistance.

No one is preventing anyone from posting GNAT questions or
questions on other specific compilers to CLA, but generally
you will speak to a larger and more knowledgable audience
if you use the chat@gnat.com list.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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Re: GNAT discussions should be here as well.

[dennison]

In article <7bgmqm$82v@drn.newsguy.com>,
  kvisko@ wrote:
> In article <MJ3xAGKZ#GA.252@pet.hiwaay.net>, "David says...
> >
> >In your lengthy message (which might have better been submitted to
> >chat@gnat.com),
>
> Why?
>
> In Other language newsgroups, such as C/C++/Java, people all the time
> ask questions in reference to using specific compilers such as
> VC++, Borland , gcc, etc..

I think (I hope) what David was getting at was that the gnat mailing list has
a different audience than c.l.a., which is better equipped to answer
gnat-specific questions. Such posts are *not* off topic on c.l.a. Its just
that there are a lot of gnat users subscribed to gnat-chat that couldn't give
a rodent's posterior about other compilers, software engineering flamewars,
and language arcania that is the normal fare here.

T.E.D.

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