Re: Gnoga the "Killer App" for Ada

[Tero Koskinen <tero.koskinen@iki.fi>]

8.10.2014 16:11, David Botton wrote:
>>> Our business decided not to use Gnoga because of the license 
>>> GPLv3. Any chances for BSD/MIT?
> 
> 
> *** Did you look at the FAQ? I discuss this there.
...
> However as pointed out this is __GMGPL v3__ not GPL v3 which means 
> you can use in closed source applications, just if you extend / 
> change the library itself _and_ you distribute your app beyond your 
> walls, you need to make just _that_ source available to others. That 
> is the reason I don't use BSD/MIT, I don't want a 3rd party company 
> building on Gnoga with out sharing :) (Even though they could get 
> away with it to a degree even with GMGPL)
> 
> All the code I've written for the community to date has been with 
> GMGPL and they have been used in 100s of closed source project (no 
> exaggeration on that number since I know of one company with over
> 100 alone using GWindows).

As a guy who releases most of his Ada code under BSD/MIT/ISC,
my experience has been that companies using open source Ada projects
with permissive licenses in their closed source projects are
willing to collaborate with the project and provide their patches
back to the project.

Maintaining a separate fork is a huge task and these days companies
tend to realise it.

Also, if you distribute your project under GPL or GMGPL, you should
actively do checks that companies using your code actually honor
the license, otherwise GPL/GMGPL is pretty pointless.

And if you trust that the companies comply with the license terms,
you most likely could trust that the same companies contribute
back to your BSD/MIT/ISC licensed projects.

Another point is that, as we have seen here, GPL'd version
of GNAT (GNAT GPL 20xx) has harmed the image of the Ada quite much.
The language gets a lot of bonus points if you can say
"You have this big amount of code under permissive BSD/MIT/ISC license
ready to be used in any project you wish."

Yours,
 Tero