Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

David Trudgett wrote:
> Jamie Ayre <ayre@adacore.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>AdaCore announces the immediate availability of the GNAT GPL 2005
>>Edition.
>>
>>AdaCore is pleased to announce the release of the GNAT GPL 2005
>>Edition to provide Free Software developers, that is developers that
>>distribute their work under the GPL (GNU General Public License), the
>>latest and most advanced Ada 2005 software development environment.
> 
> 
> Hello, Jamie,
> 
> Your website says: 
> 
>     The GNAT GPL Edition is licensed for Free Software development and
>     is subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public
>     License (GPL). Read the terms carefully before downloading.
> 
> (It then provides a link to the GPL licence at gnu.org.)
> 
> The GCC compiler is also licensed under the GPL, which allows the
> development and distribution of proprietary software using that
> compiler. Could you please explain here on comp.lang.ada how the same
> licence can have two different effects, one for GCC, and another for
> GNAT?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> David
> 
> 
> 

We will have to wait and see if they respond but in general questions 
like this to AdaCore usually come back (correctly) with "consult your 
own qualified legal council for advise"...


But the short ** non-qualified ** answer is that whether programming in 
C,C++ or Ada, there is generally some run-time library that one links 
against for any non-trivial programs (ok..there are probably non-trivial 
programs that can be 100% run-time free.)...

In any case, with GCC for C one usually links against the the OS libc 
which is non-GPL (or at least has that option)

For C++, the GCC runtime library has a "special exception" clause like 
the GNAT-3.15 runtime used to have.

For Ada, the runtime (and supporting libraries) which are extensive used 
to be GPL with the special exception that prevented having to apply the 
GPL to programs that "make use of" the library.

In this AdaCore version, they have removed the exception. One can only 
assume that they negotiated this with the FSF (who is the copyright 
holder on most of this even though it was mostly developed by AdaCore). 
FSF probably would not have a problem with it anyway since the more 
"Free" it is the more they like it. Note I am only speculating that this 
requires FSF approval. There is a copyright assignment process that one 
goes through when submitting code to the FSF GCC tree but it is not 
clear to me what unique rights the original copyright holder might retain.



The runtime files in the FSF tree still have the special exception so I 
would guess AdaCore has written some script that they run when packaging 
the GPL version that strips out the special exception portion of the 
header and again has cleared this with the FSF.

This does muddy the water a little even for free SW developers that want 
  to use this compiler version since it makes it (a little) more 
difficult to release the code under a non GPL but still free license. 
However, it really has no effect for people creating libraries that they 
distribute as source code under the GMGPL (with the old exception clause).

We will have to wait and see how this ends up working out. In the end