From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,1d8ab55e71d08f3d X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,1efdd369be089610 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: what DOES the GPL really say? Date: 1997/08/22 Message-ID: X-Deja-AN: 267997320 References: <5ph4g5$sbs$1@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <5tich7$ro6$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss Date: 1997-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: <> The DoD funded GNAT to provide a research vehicle for academic use, and it was clear for this purpose that free availability of sources was important, so the NYU contract with the DoD insisted on a. The use of the GPL for all sources b. The assignment of the copyright to the FSF The second part is important, because it ensures that GNAT remains under the GPL. Note that the copyright holder of GPL'ed software can always change their mind, and not use the GPL on a subsequent release. This for instance could have happened if NYU had held the copyright, and had decided to try to commercialize GNAT after the contract ended. But the assignment to the FSF involves a commitment for continued availability under the GPL. The narrow focus of the DoD interest in GNAT partly resulted from dealing with rather fierce opposition to the entire project from some, but by no means all, vendors of proprietary Ada products. Indeed the contract with the DoD was for a subset of Ada 95, excluding some key feaures (including fixed-point and subunits, that were perceived to be required in the market place, but not critical for academic research -- validation was also excluded). In fact the missing features were included anyway, but not on government time. Both Ed and I took sabbaticals during the project, so we could work on it on our own time, not being paid by government sources, so we used (part of) this time to implement the missing features. We always recognized the potential of GNAT in two other areas 1. Teaching. The DoD did not have the view of GNAT as useful for this purpose, and indeed Mike Feldman's proposal to use GNAT for the academic Ada compiler to be supported by the DoD, was turned down, despite its advantageous price, on the grounds that ACT was not a credible organization for carrying out the validation (a bit ironic in retrospect, given that ACT is still the only company to have done 100% validations with all the annexes, but it's easy to be wiser after the fact -- of course it is a bit of a puzzle why validation was required at all in this project). Nevertheless, we have always regarded this as a major opportunity for GNAT, and have put a lot of work, e.g. particularly in the generation of good error messages) to facilitate this use. We are certainly pleased to see it succeed in this area, and in particular the fact that it is being used at the Air Force Academy for teaching Ada, having been chosen by them as the best product for the task, is pleasing. However, there is fierce competition from Object Ada, and my view is that having two low cost options for teaching is a good thing. Two is a magic number when it comes to competition, and the competition to provide the best possible environment for students learning Ada will definitely benefit those students. I should say in this area that we are planning to distribute the next version of the NT version of GNAT with AdaGIDE, the IDE written by Martin Carlisle at the Air Force Academy. This is GPL'ed code written in Ada that provides a very nice environment for student use (and may well be found useful by advanced users as well). 2. Commercial production use. This was of course very definitely NOT part of the reason for DoD's support. Although the DoD had poured a lot of money early on in Ada 83 days into the support of production compilers (look up how much was spent on ALS and ALSN for example), it was clearly not viable for the DoD to support the GNAT project on these grounds. However, the open nature of the development, and the use of the free software approach, meant that there was no way to restrict this possibility. Indeed, we have always taken the view that the needs of the academic community are not so different from the commercial production community. Both need high quality, full language compilers. Both can benefit from the availability of sources, and free redistribution. We always intended to produce a compiler that would compete effectively with proprietary compilers, because we saw this as the mechanism for continued support and development of GNAT. At first, we assumed that Cygnus would take on this task. However, Cygnus had no interest in Ada, and we later realized that we would have to form our own company to follow this idea. Actually I think that works out well. Having ACT be 100% dedicated to Ada and Ada related products is more effective for the Ada community. So, I hope that give a clear background on the history of the GNAT funding and project. Certainly the GNAT contract was one of the more remarkable contracts signed by the government (it includes the full text of the GPL, and, as I mentioned, explicitly requires the copyright to be assigned to the FSF). The credit for making this happen belongs to Chris Anderson, and her imaginative and flexible support staff at Eglin Air Force base. A lot of tricky mazes had to be threaded to get GNAT to happen, and Chris managed to find her way through them where I am sure many others would have failed. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies