Re: Licences

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Lucretia wrote:
> <quote>
> Why do people keep pretending that AdaCore's removal of the GMGPL
> license exception from their runtime isn't a really big change for the
> Ada community?  It really does make a difference to a lot of individual
> 
> programmers (and thus to Ada).  Programmers who cannot afford to pay
> AdaCore (or who choose not to) now must rely on significantly out of
> date versions of compilers and tools in order to "make money" on a
> program they wrote.
> </quote>

No. Not exactly. Programmers who cannot affort to pay AdaCore (or who 
choose not to) must either rely on siginificantly out of date versions 
of the compilers. Or they must rely on versions from the FSF tree. Or 
they must rely on non-free but still relatively cheap offerings from 
RRSoftware (or perhaps Aonix)

> 
> Exactly! I believe this will produce a code fork in the FSF tree and
> people like me will continue to use that version of GNAT, unless
> another free compiler becomes available.
> 
> Thanks,
> Luke.
> 

I am not sure why a fork is needed. AdaCore appears to still be 
contributing to the FSF tree and there has been no discussion at all in 
the FSF GCC groups about a license change. AdaCore goes through quite a 
bit of work to package and test and "put their name" on a particular 
GNAT version and they have decided (right or wrong..for them and us) 
that it is best for their business if they cause some limiting of the 
use of their freely disctributed versions.

The FSF tree does exist. It does continue to be maintained and it is 
(probably) in the best interest of AdaCore to keep working within that 
tree to some extent.

I find it interesting when people talk of wanting a $0 dollar Aonix 
build when a big reason given for why the FSF tree is not acceptable is 
the lack of the distributed systems annex and ASIS. Are those things 
availaible from Aonix? (I honestly do not know).

I am not trying to say that I am happy with the situation. I just don't 
think that the FSF tree approach is really all that bad. There are of 
course quality issues with the FSF tree at times but more and more 
non-ada GCC developers appear to at least be enabling Ada during their 
bootstraps.

The quality will probably never get where we'd like it as long as the 
state of Ada in the tree is not a consideration for the release 
criteria. I am not sure if this will ever change but if a few people 
stepped up to the plate and became GCC developers supporting the Ada 
tree it would not hurt.