AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

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.

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 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.


> - 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.