Re: gnat-3.10

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ronald Cole said

<<dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> We have a number of large customers on HPUX. They were using 3.09 when it
> was the current release, most of them have by now switched to 3.10 which is
> the current product release. As usual, this will be released publicly in
> the future.

GNAT is based on GCC, right?  What section of the GPL are you relying
on to justify making binary releases of modified GPL software to your
paying clients and refusing to make the source code available to the
public at the same time?  Under Section 3 of the GPL, it seems clear
that once you distribute an object code work based on a GPL'd program,
you must release the source code concurrently.

And why hasn't the text of the GPL been included in your previous
source distributions?

--
Forte International, P.O. Box 1412, Ridgecrest, CA  93556-1412
Ronald Cole <ronald@ridgenet.net>        Phone: (760) 499-9142
President, CEO                             Fax: (760) 499-9152
My PGP fingerprint: E9 A8 E3 68 61 88 EF 43  56 2B CE 3E E9 8F 3F 2B
>>



Some confusions here. First there is no requirement that we release anything
at all to the public. Ronald you may want to look up the GPL yourself, it
has no such requirment at all. 

The requirement is that we make available sources on request to anyone
to whom we make objects available. Also there is no requirement to "release"
the source code, just to make it available at a reasonable copying charge.
(as I say, Ronald, you should carefully read the GPL, since you seem to have
some misconceptions about it).

However, we do in fact release binary versions, though we are not required to
do so, and in accordance with the GPL, we do indeed release sources for these
binary versions.

As to file COPYING being missing, I will investigate, for convenience it
should be in the release, although you can always get a copy as noted in
the headers.

We are strong supporters of the GPL, and carefully follow it, and insist that
all users of GNAT also follow it (this in practice only restricts people making
modificatoins to the compiler, since the runtime is released under a modified
GPL that places almost no restrictins in practice on its use).

We often find that people have strange misconceptions about the GPL, in
particular they think that you are required to distribute stuff, you are
not! and that you are required to distribute sources free, you are not.

The distinction is important, we like people to know that we take the extra
effort to make versions of GNAT public not because we have to, but because
we choose to, since we think it is valuable to the Ada community.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies