Re: GNAT GPL 2005 Edition is now available

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> The coupling with the compiler is no problem from a legal standpoint,
> because the compiler's license has no effect on the executables
> produced with it.

As you probably know, if you read someone else's source code and then 
write down what you've read and distribute it with a different license, 
then you infringe on the original author's copyright. Therefore, someone 
who's maintaining a GMGPL fork of the Gnat runtime should be careful to 
avoid looking at any GPL version of the runtime. Because of the tight 
coupling, I assume that the fork would have to be updated to exactly 
match each version of the compiler. Because it would have to match 
exactly, I think this would be difficult to do without looking at 
AdaCore's changes. I'm not sure whether it would be legally safe to read 
the sources of the compiler to figure out what would need to be changed 
in the runtime. A lawyer might argue that you've transferred 
"intellectual property" from the compiler into the runtime. If one 
couldn't look at the compiler sources, it would be even more difficult 
to update the runtime. That's why I thought the tight coupling would be 
a problem.

On the other hand, I've never quite understood what makes a runtime 
library different from any other library. Maybe a runtime isn't quite as 
magic as I think.

Anyway, let's hope we'll never have to deal with these problems in practice.

-- 
Björn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
                    r o.b n.p son eri nu