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From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: "Open Core" and the Ada Community
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:53:24 +0000
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David Botton <david@botton.com> writes:

> However we need a real team taking charge of a fork of FSF GNAT and a
> foundation to become "true" stewards of the full freedoms GNAT
> version.

I don't see the point of this, really. FSF GNAT has the freedoms you
need. The things that don't have the freedoms are some of the libraries;
xmlada (though an unrestricted source is available), gnatcoll, asis.

It's annoying that there's no public repo for gprbuild, but the annual
GPL releases are pretty reliable (with the odd patch).

It can take a while for changes to work their way through the system,
especially when the subject is not on the maintainers' (i.e.AdaCore's)
main line: for example, GCC 6 currently allows us to compile a
restricted runtime (i.e., embedded) that supports finalization but not
exceptions, but doesn't let us bind it[1].

I'm not sure how long it takes for an AdaCore employee to get to grips
with GNAT compiler internals; looks pretty daunting to me. Tinkering
with tools and libraries is more my thing!

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2015-12/msg01951.html