Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Jeffrey Creem wrote :
> 
>>Hopefully someone at Greenhills is paying attention to this discussion.
>>This confusing license perhaps "exposing" a company to GPL terms when
>>the headers clearly are not GPL will make a great writeup that will
>>pretty much make it impossible to even use GNATPro within my company.
> 
> 
> I don't understand. Did your company not receive a license statement
> from AdaCore along with GNAT Pro? Which company do you think is being
> "exposed to the GPL terms"? And what does GreenHills have to do with
> it? I wouldn't expect any problems, since AdaCore and GreeHills have a
> formal agreement.


I should have been clearer here (though I think others have somewhat 
answered some of this).

1) Actually, I am pretty sure when we have purchased GNATPro in the past 
that we have not gotten a license agreement **signed** by someone in 
authority at AdaCore. Certainly we do get license agreements.

2) I mentioned Greenhills because they have been publishing papers about 
this risks of Open source/Linux (http://www.ghs.com/linux.html) and or 
Non-Greenhills products(some would call this stuff FUD. At times I agree 
but generally you can't argue with the basic truths in the papers. You 
probably can disagree with some of the conclusions).

3) The biggest reason this murky license is likely to eventually result 
in AdaCore being banned is that many large companies are already leary 
of anything marked GPL in any fashion.  (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/jk9xy 
Note that this tiny URL is pointing to a PDF at a lockheed martin 
server)..I'll save you the trouble of looking. The summary is that they 
ban their suppliers from providing anything GPL to them. Yes there are 
ways out/around it..But it is not uncommon for this to be read as a 
defacto ban by some.

In any case, all of the assurances from the person who stands to make 
money on the SW won't matter if the FUD level (and truth level) gets 
high enough. There is an extremely good chance that another vendor's 
compiler will be picked due to the GPL "stink" on AdaCore and these 
misleading license terms on the CVS archive do nothing to help that cause.


> 
> 
>>At this point, it would seem the only purpose of the public CVS archives
>>is to entrap people to allow AdaCore to sue at will. Comments and
>>threads like this are of course likely to cause AdaCore to pull the CVS
>>archives and that will be somewhat of a shame for free software
>>developers but in its current state, the public CVS archives are doing
>>more harm than good.
> 
> 
> No, I don't think AdaCore want to sue anyone. I would rather think they
> are die-hard, purist Free Software believers, like RMS (i.e. "free up
> your software or pay"). Furthermore, they do not seem very eager to
> serve the market of SMEs and one-man shops, who have been asking for


Obviously one can't get into their heads but I'd be willing to bet that 
the change in terms has everything to do with business (not wanting to 
be their own competition) and nothing to do with free software purism. 
In fact, I sure hope that is the case since they are not a 
not-for-profit enterprise.  And I agree that they are unlikely to sue 
anyone but <wild speculation to illustrate a point>in 3 years when all 
the rest of the business dries up and we are all programming in XYZZY 
who knows the last dying breaths of the company might look like </wild 
speculation to illustrate a point>


> affordable GMGPL licenses for a long time. Well, that's their business
> decision. As Marc A. Criley said so rightly, this decision just leaves
> more room to Aonix and RR Software in that market.


True. Hopefully Aonix, RR Software, Greenhills and the other vendors 
remain vialble alternatives. Having more vendors is obviously a good thing.

> 
> I do agree that AdaCore's decision does more harm than good to Ada's
> attractivity to SMEs. They are the only ones being hurt. The change of
> license has no effect on corporations large enough to use GNAT Pro, or
> on students, hobbyists, or free software developers.
> 

I think I can say with high confidence that the change in license does 
indeed have an effect on corporations large enough to use GNATPro. It 
adds to the anti-gpl-of-any-kind FUD and will almost certainly cause 
other vendors to be selected in some cases. Hopefully the "free version" 
terms change gains them more customers than it costs them. I suspect it 
probably will.