Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

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

Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com> writes:

> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> > I received detailed answers from AdaCore's Robert Dewar and Arnaud
> > Charlet regarding the licenses of software downloaded from their
> > servers.  In summary:
> > - All software downloaded from AdaCore is pure GPL, no matter what
> > the
> >   headers say.
> > - This also applies to software downloaded from the CVS server in
> >   source-only form.
> >
> 
> Hopefully someone at Greenhills is paying attention to this
> discussion. This confusing license perhaps "exposing" a company to GPL
> terms when the headers clearly are not GPL will make a great writeup
> that will pretty much make it impossible to even use GNATPro within my
> company.

What AdaCore does at the moment is (IMHO, IANAL) to spread pure FUD
(if in doubt, license from ACT) -- ironically using GPL as a
weapon. Of course if any of the "proprietary software is the only
good" shills will get hold of the subject, FUD will go well with
further FUD.

> At this point, it would seem the only purpose of the public CVS
> archives is to entrap people to allow AdaCore to sue at will. Comments

Not only. Of course they want patches flowing back to them and beta
testers are also welcome. The contribution list on the old site for
2.4.0 read like this:


  # Alex Bykat who helped us compile GtkAda 0.2 on Solaris 2.5.
  # Jeff Creem who did the first port of GtkAda to Win32. Note that the Win32 port of GtkAda is now handled by the GtkAda team.
  # Philippe Durif who wrote the first version of the GtkAda documentation.
  # Samuel Tardieu who wrote the man pages of GtkAda for the debian project.
  # Francisco Javier Loma Daza who sent us some useful patches for gtk-style and gtk-table.
  # Paul Pukite who sent us the Gdk.RGB package.
  # Thomas Brupbacher who implemented Glade's support for Clist, List, Paned, Vscrollbar and Viewport, a basic support for XML attributes and various other bug fixes.
  # David Botton who maintains a GtkAda mirror.
  # Bobby D. Bryant who fixed the handling of comments in Glib.XML.
  # Manuel Op de Coul who has contributed some documentation.
  # Aidan Skinner who has contributed some patches to the Gnome binding.
  # Preben Randhol who has contributed several patches, in particular for porting gate to glade-2.

Useful, this, isn't it?

> and threads like this are of course likely to cause AdaCore to pull
> the CVS archives and that will be somewhat of a shame for free
> software developers but in its current state, the public CVS archives
> are doing more harm than good.

ACK.

> 
> 
> > - They refuse to give any assurances regarding copyright ownership, so
> >   I feel that I now need to go ask the authors.
> > - They will not sign a license document, even if a lawyer asked them
> >   (they are not required to sign anything, of course).
> 
> These last two statements are of course less problematic. AdaCore
> really has no reason to sign things for people with which they have no
> business relationship.

I think, if they want to keep their rights to publicly available
source they can be expected to send a binding letter stating their
position on their ownership.

Regards -- Markus