Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

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

Ronald Cole says

<<So, if one of your "wavefront" customers started giving me copies and
I proceeded to make them available for anonymous ftp, you wouldn't
retaliate?>>

As has been explained before, and as I think most people except Ronald
Cole perfectly well understand, the situation is as follows.

We ask people receiving wavefront versions to refrain from distributing
them, because it is actively unhelpful to the GNAT project and to the
development and use of GNAT (both by customers and by unsupported users)
to have versions floating around that have not gone through the kind of
field testing that we insist on for public release.

A wavefront version is a temporary release that is made for the purpose
of solving a particular customers problem. We do not promise at any point
to make such wavefront versions available -- indeed both from our point
of view and from the point of view of most of our customers, it is better
to figure out workarounds rather than be constantly using new versions
of the compiler that have not been field tested -- by their nature
wavefront versions cannot be thoroughly tested (or they would become
real releases suitable for general release).

If people started distributing wavefront versions freely, then w would
probably reluctantly decide to stop making them available, since it would
be clear that their distribution was harmful. That would be too bad for
the cases where they really solve a problem.

But as I said, this is a very small part of our support activity anyway
(sending out wavefront releases). So if we did decide to curtail the
distribution of wavefront release because of problems with uncontrolled
releases, then this would be nothing like "refusing to do business
with people" or anything like that. it would just be a matter of balancing
the needs of customers in certain situations with other needs, something
we have to do all the time.

One important point here to realize is that sometimes we will send out
wavefronts that we know have a flaw, that will not affect the current
use. For example, we may know that a recent change has broken the COBOL
interface, but if we know a given customer is not using the COBOL
interface, then the wavefornt may still be useful. But of course
general distribution of that wavefront would most definitely be harmful.

The situation with GNAT is very much like that with the GCC snapshots.
The GNU project strongly discourages people from distributing the
snapshots for exactly the same reasons I give above, and generally
we don't see the snapshots being widely distributed, and that is
definitely a good thing.

The point here is to aim at effective quality-controlled release management
for GNAT. The fact that GNAT is free software means that some restrictions
that could be achieved with contractual instruments for propietary software
cannot be achieved this way for GNAT.

But in practice that is not a problem. The GNAT user community in general
understands I think quite well what our goals are here, and cooperates
not because there is some lawyer threatening them with dire penalties,
but because they want to help the GNAT project. That we do not have
dozens of wavefront versions of GNAT in various unknown states floating
around the net, causing mass confusion, testifies to this.

There is, as Richard Kenner, points out a huge difference between
illegal and impolite or uncooperative. This distinction seems to
be lost on Ronald, but I think the rest of the community understands it.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies