Re: SAL, Auto_Text_IO release

[M E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de> writes:

> M E Leypold wrote:
> 
> > IMHO if Florist and GTkAda go pure GPL that will hurt Ada like nothing
> > before. I'd wish that the community here (which has some interest in
> > advocating Ada over other languages, say Java or FORTRAN (pardon,
> > thats Fortran today ... :-)) would have the ability to see that.
> 
> It might not be necessary to see conditional futures in the presence
> of GMGPL releases, unsupported as they may be. It is also permitted
> to copy ideas from GPL software.

That I can't parse ore relate to my own statement? What did you mean?

> I'm not sure whether growing Ada business cares about public

Growing? What have I missed? :-).

> availability of Ada stuff without GPL restrictions, about portability,
> about the Ada mission etc when living in a niche seems just fine.

> Don't know whether market actors will ever see the coexistence
> of collaboration and competition as a possibility that helps
> everyone: imagine vendors working on portable Ada libraries, and still
> getting payed for compilers, IDEs, and support.

Well. ACT (i.e.) did see this coexistence obviously for some time.


> Anyway, among those who see the library issues that low budget shops
> have are, for example, MinGW, Debian GNAT, or gnuada.sf.net.

Most of that is a fork of the former GMGPL version of Gnat, Florist,
etc. The intresting part is, that I have the feeling that (a) GtkAda
is not GMGPL any more and (b) hardly anybody has realized that yet and
(c) it is not clear what the last GMGPL version (if ever) was.

Since GtkAda presently is the only portable GUI-Binding (portable
between Win32 and Linux) which looks like something "consumers" would
find acceptable (I don't want to bash the Tk-Binding -- haven't tried
it and Tk has perhaps become much more modern than the version I
remember) -- If it now turns out, that GtkAda has been pure-GPL for a
long time, "we" have obviously missed the time for a GMGPL fork.

That's all a lot of "if"'s, so one will have to see.

Regards -- Markus