Re: Is 3.15p -still- the latest GNAT 'p' release?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>>>You could always contact friends who are (or work for) paying
>>>customers and get a Pro version from them.
>>
>>This is pirating.  I will never encourage such a disrespectful
> 
>     I thought Gnat was Open Source and was developed with taxpayer funds
> on that basis.  No?

The situation is much more complex than that.  First, having a 
non-public release of GNAT is not piracy, whether or not you paid for 
it.  Paying ACT customers are encouraged not to redestribute the 
non-public releases in this way, but there is nothing that legally 
prevents them--or ACT from doing so.  In fact, there have been times 
when I have been given access to such versions--by ACT--either to help 
decide whether some behavior was a bug, or to help fix a bug.  In those 
cases, I have disposed of the wavefront (or in one case, I think, 3.12a 
release) once the problem was solved.  I didn't do this for legal or 
moral reasons, but because I wanted any code I publically distributed to 
compile and run on the current GNAT public release.

On the other hand, if you as a GNAT licensee give a copy of the compiler 
to someone, then report their bugs and problems to ACT as your own, that 
is fraud.

Which brings us full-circle to the issue of public releases by ACT. 
First, AFAIK, any contracts involved in the creation of GNAT were 
between the government and New York University.  NYU is, I think, a part 
owner of ACT.  But the public releases of GNAT are intended as a public 
service, and if you check, you should download them from NYU, not from 
ACT.  ACT is involved in deciding when a version of GNAT is stable 
enough to warrant becomming a public release.

If you are familiar with the concept of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, 
for some software the cathedral approach is much more appropriate. 
Public releases of compilers are one such case.  If you want to put 
together several publically available software packages into a project, 
you are much better served if all of the developers of those packages 
used the same compiler.  If each used different versions of GNAT, or 
required different versions of the same libraries, you end up having to 
do a lot more work.

So as far as I am concerned, it will be nice when there is a stable GNAT 
release that uses the new GCC backend.  But I am quite content to use 
3.15p until such a version is available.  (Well, until the issue of Ada 
2005 compatibility starts to become important.  But right now, even the 
2005 in that is just a guess.)


-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The terrorist enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is 
unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality. Such 
an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased or negotiated with. It 
can only be destroyed--and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the business 
at hand."  -- Dick Cheney