Re: What exactly is the licensing situation with GNAT?

[Hubert <herrdoktor@fumanchu.com>]

On 11/11/2014 16:50 PM, David Botton wrote:
> Some viruses can be good, some viruses can be bad, and some viruses that are good are being abused.
>
> By using the GPL in a compiler run time, initial boot loader code, etc. AdaCore places a  "license virus" on your software, i.e. regardless of your intended license it is now under the full GPL.
>
> That may be a good thing for OS tools even compiler tools, etc. perhaps you may even prefer the GPL, but when placed in a compiler it is an abuse designed to make an open source compiler Shareware at best.
>
> David Botton
>

Ok, I was wondering about that for a while, hence my question about the 
GPL situation with the libraries. I was under the impressino that the 
thing that makes the resulting program GPL was the libraries and not the 
compiler, but this explains now why any output from the GPL compiler is 
GPL if the runtime that is essential to run the compiled program is also 
GPL.
The whole situation is not so easily understood and the explanation in 
the Libre Adacore package don't make it much clearer either. I was 
thinking if it is the Libraries only, one could omit them and write a 
new set of libraries, but this essentially rules that out.

Now this raises another question. I have been reading through the posts 
regarding Gnoga ( a great project by the way ) and it is my 
understanding that the applications developed with Gnoga can run on a 
server and the browser on the client side only render the output. How is 
the situation with that sort of stuff? If you write a server application 
that is never given out, can you do that with the GPL version?

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