Re: GLADE and GPL (was: what DOES the GPL really say?)

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

Roy Fielding says

<<Version 1.02 (the one that was "the most recent" last week -- I haven't
had a chance to see if there is a newer one) contains the GPL without
any modifications or exceptions.  Can you point me to a release that
contains something different?  If the license has changed since 1.02,
then life will be much easier.
>>


Since it is always worrisome when someone claims a slipup of this
magnitude, I double checked.

I chedcked the 1.02 release of GLADE which is the current public release.
If you have the actual sources that we initially distributed to the
net, and which corresponded to what I found at the site I looked at,
the Garlic sources are definitely using the modified GPL. The gnatdist
directory is using the regular GPL, as expected, and the ada directory has
some sources using modified GPL and some using GPL as appropriate.

If you do not see this in your version, then somehow it has been corrupted.
This is hard to believe, but always possible, we have no control over
versions of GNAT and GLADE outside ACT. The only way to be absolutely sure
that you have the version we distribute is to get it from us. But in
practice although discrepancies are possible in theory, we have never seen
them really occur.

Finally, if your problem is that you want a version of gnatdist that is
not covered by the GPL. It is a little surprising to me that anyone would
need this (unless they were planning on producing a proprietary version
of gnatdist, something we definitely want to prevent). It is double
surprising that someone at a university would need this.

If anyone *does* have a case in which the licensing seems to prevent doing
something that you think we would consider reasonable, then you should
contact us to discuss the matter. So far, the only case in which we have seen
the issue of the GPL come up is in the context of two other Ada compiler
vendors who were interested in using the GNAT front end with their proprietary
back ends.

The outcome in these two cases is that, told that they could not do that, one
vendor decided to use another front end, the other decided to use GNAT and
make their back end and tool chain all GPL'ed.

The former outcome does not bother us one bit. The latter outcome is very
pleasing, and means that there will be more free software available to the
Ada community.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies