Re: Contributing patches to GPL Ada projects (was: Is Ada dead?)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <5ee5b646.0107101433.fedfed8@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
says...
>
>Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<67F27.14089$Kf3.151364@www.newsranger.com>...
>
>> As for the ACT XML project, I wouldn't expect you to see many 
>> contributions from outside of your customer community, simply because 
>> the licensing terms are not usable for serious outside users. 
>
>However, a much larger, much more active, and much more interesting
>set of serious outside users (from the point of view of outside
>contributions) is people who are building and distribution Free
>Software components and tools. Such people have been the main
>outside contributors to GNAT and its associated technologies, and
>I would expect that to be the case.

So you are saying that you don't expect the licensing terms to not have any
delterious effect on contributions to the Gnat XML, because proprietary users
almost never contribute anything anyway? That hasn't been my experience with
OpenToken (which is a similar kind of project serving a different purpose). But
I'll admit the sample size on this one project is small enough to be
unscientific in the extreme. So perhaps I'm wrong. I hope so.

>In addition, our supported customers can and do contribute useful
>code, and they have a definite incentive to do so, because if their
>modifications are incorporated into the mainline GNAT sources, then
>they don't have to keep putting them in themselves.

I hadn't thought about it in that much detail before, but I'd say that would
also make a fair explanation of why OpenToken's "proprietary" users contribute a
lot of code. :-) (I put quotes around "proprietary", because there is a very
large class of users, my present employer included, who don't really distribute
their sources, but prefer to keep their options open.)

>As for the comment that the lack of binaries made by ACT will inhibit
>such contributions, I doubt it. People in a position to make useful

I doubt that too, and would have said so had I seen someone say it. Clearly
there's no way you can contribute without looking at a source distribution.

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