Re: GNAT license rational (was [ANNOUNCE] XML/Ada 0.5 released)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <5viG6.1064$SZ5.86996@www.newsranger.com>, Ted Dennison says...
>
>In article <H7iG6.2949$DW1.140771@iad-read.news.verio.net>, Vincent Marciante
>says...
>>We need a comment from RBKD regarding the rational for the special exception
>>in GNAT's license.
>
>I was around before that exception existed. What happened was that someone piped
>up saying that their lawyers wouldn't allow them to use Gnat for their project,
>as they were of the opinion that linking GPL-ed packages into their program
>would require them to make the whole program GPL-ed. Thus to prevent this
>scenario, all the package sources that aren't just part of the compiler itself
>had an exception put in to allow linking them into an executable without
>invoking any provisions of the GPL. That way GNAT itself is GPL'ed, but 

Well, I got no less than 2 replies from Dr. Dewar on this one. I haven't seen
one of his postings by proxy pop up here on this subject, so suffice it to say
that he *strongly* disagrees with this version of events, at least as it
pertains to the GNAT RTL.

Note that I never metioned the RTL either, and it was not my intention to do so.
I was only talking about the licenses on the packages that are distributed with
the compiler for "with"ing by users (at least the ones that aren't taken
straight from the LRM, which of course have an LRM license).

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