Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:
> Please cast a vote on this forum.  This is the time to influence the
> next version of Debian.

Here is another (and extensive) contribution from an anonymous
contributor, posted on their behalf.  Here goes:

From the reactions in the comp.lang.ada forum it is clear that the
positive news about the much anticipated "official" public GNAT
distribution is completely drowned by the strong negative feelings
triggered by the limitation that it can only be used to develop GPL
software.

AdaCore obviously is fully entitled to distribute the GNAT GPL 2005
Edition as they did, but this license change is unfortunate for the
promotion of Ada.

GNAT has been and still is one of the most important tools for Ada
advocacy, and Ada 2005 offers many opportunities to get new people
interested.  Although I am a strong supporter of open source software,
I am an even stronger supporter of Ada and would like to see its usage
increase.

It is a fact that the Ada community is in much more need for support
and advocacy than the open source community is.

A freely available Ada toolset, without limitation on how the produced
executables can be distributed, is hugely more important for Ada's
progress than a GPL enforcing Ada toolset might be for the open source
community.

The former can attract new developers and one-man-shops to Ada, help
them build new products, and increase the "market share" of Ada.
The latter will most probably have a negligible effect on the strength
of the open source movement, while it might chase away many who are
genuinely interested in Ada, because they have other alternatives where
this GPL "contamination" is not an issue (GNU C++ for example).

Therefore, I feel it is very important that on a platform such as
Debian a free "no strings attached" Ada development environment stays
available.  Ideally, this should be a recent GNAT release (both for
bug fixes and Ada 2005 features), close to the "normal" Debian GCC
distribution, and with an as complete toolset as possible (ASIS, GLADE,
etc.).  Developers of GPL software would then still have the option of
using the GNAT GPL 2005 Edition directly from libre.adacore.com, should
they so desire.

Hence, my vote is:

Voter             gnat-gpl gnat-3.4  gnat-4.0 gnat-3.4+patches WAIT
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Anonymous #3          -1                2

-- 
Ludovic Brenta, on behalf of an anonymous poster.