Re: Companies Only Offering Ada-95 Compilers

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2012-05-23, Fritz Wuehler <fritz@spamexpire-201205.rodent.frell.theremailer.net> wrote:
> <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>
>> opinions and others. I don't believe the runtime libraries will ever  
>> become pure GPL, because as much they would like, if they could, make  
>> every thing pure GPL, *they are as much aware they can't* and aware doing  
>> so will be counterproductive for the FSF lobbying, as making runtime  
>> libraries pure GPL, would prevent many people from using it at all.
>
> I explained how this will work. Right now everyone realizes Linux is the
> major focus of FSF because Linux kernel is GPL, Linux people love GPL,
> etc. Autotools is supposed to work cross platform but it's mostly for Linux.
>
> The BSD groups (Open, Free, Net, DragonFly) don't like GPL and they are
> moving at different rates to clang/LLVM and other ways of reducing
> dependence on gnu toolchain and other GPL code and have very little GPL
> compared to Linux.
>
> What I think is going to happen is as everybody who doesn't like GPL moves
> off GPL-anything, the people who like GPL (Linux developers and users) will
> not be upset at all, indeed they will be very happy, to see all their
> libraries GPLd. So no, FSF can't go GPL libraries today, but things are
> moving in the right direction (for everybody, really) so sooner or later
> only Linux code will be GPL, including all the libraries, and BSD and other
> projects will have virtually no GPL code. Then there will be no war and
> nobody upset when FSF GPLs all the libraries.
>

If this played out as you describe, then the day that the FSF applies the
pure GPL (without any exceptions, including the LGPL, allowed) to it's
libraries will be the day that commercial closed source development will
end on Linux. Day+1 will be the day that RedHat, with it's large commercial
user base (and support contracts to match) will fork the libraries in
question under the original license and commercial development on Linux
will resume, but with the FSF no longer been relevant.

This has happened before and can happen again. (XFree86 -> X.Org)

For this reason, I am not worried about the FSF making everything pure GPL
even though some may wish to. However, a more targetted move to the GPL,
such as when ACT removed the GMGPL exception on the public version of
GtkAda, is always possible, but I don't see any evidence of anyone moving
in this direction yet with GNAT itself.

However, it's always nice to have backup options (even though I prefer Ada)
in case this does happen, so thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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