Re: Ada for Windows CE

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> writes:

> I must admit, that I do have reservations because of GNAT being
> available for free.

Why?  ACT's staff isn't starving, and although there are some rumors
that GNAT had quite an impact on the proprietary Ada compiler industry
(I don't know if this is true, more me scapegoating), the availability
of GNAT has certainly benefited the Ada community as a whole.

> I believe that there may be a way around this. Give away GNAT, as
> usual, and sell some useful low-level libraries or other tools for
> embedded systems.

If I interpret Robert Dewar's part comments on related issues
correctly, this is not the business modell of Ada Core Technologies.

> What is ACT's policy on what I would call a sublicense for a specific
> architecture?

ACT is not the copyright owner of large parts of GNAT, at least
according to the source code.  Copyright has been assigned to the
Free Software Foundation, and some parts of the runtime library are
copyrighted by Florida State University.

Non-GPL sublicensing is unlikely to happen, however.  But you are free
to take the GNAT sources and port it to another target, and license
the result under the GPL.