AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[David Botton]

I am extremely pleased to see AdaCore has posted non-virused versions of some of their libraries on github. https://github.com/AdaCore

I give them every praise for these efforts to rejoin the greater Ada community as good citizens and hope it continues on to the more important libraries like XmlAda that affect the compiler and future releases of their "GPL" compiler.

David Botton

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-12-06, David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:
> I am extremely pleased to see AdaCore has posted non-virused
> versions of some of their libraries on github. https://github.com/AdaCore
>

It's certainly a start, but before any gets too excited about seeing
GtkAda on GitHub check the licence - it's still GPL. :-(

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Michael B.]

On 12/06/15 03:33, David Botton wrote:
> I am extremely pleased to see AdaCore has posted non-virused versions of some of their libraries on github. https://github.com/AdaCore

Non-virused? GtkAda on Github contains a file "COPYING.RUNTIME" which 
seems to be a runtime exception. Does that mean, binaries of programs 
using GtkAda from Github can be distributed without releasing the sources?

Michael

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-12-06, Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
> On 2015-12-06, David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:
>> I am extremely pleased to see AdaCore has posted non-virused
>> versions of some of their libraries on github. https://github.com/AdaCore
>>
>
> It's certainly a start, but before any gets too excited about seeing
> GtkAda on GitHub check the licence - it's still GPL. :-(
>

Following Michael's observation, I took another look and a couple of
files I checked in the source code does indeed appear to have the
runtime exception added back into it.

I was going by the readme which has no mention of this in the licence
section.

The question now is: can we trust ACT to not suddenly remove the
exception in the same way as they did around a decade ago ? Comments ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-12-06, Michael B. <michaelb@example.com> wrote:
> On 12/06/15 03:33, David Botton wrote:
>> I am extremely pleased to see AdaCore has posted non-virused versions of some of their libraries on github. https://github.com/AdaCore
>
> Non-virused? GtkAda on Github contains a file "COPYING.RUNTIME" which 
> seems to be a runtime exception. Does that mean, binaries of programs 
> using GtkAda from Github can be distributed without releasing the sources?
>

On initial inspection, yes. However all the RTL source code would need to
be checked to make sure the exception is in place. My main concern now is
can we be sure ACT won't pull the exception overnight as they did about a
decade ago ? (IIRC, it was around the GtkAda 2.4 timeframe)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Michael B.]

On 12/06/15 13:14, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On initial inspection, yes. However all the RTL source code would need to
> be checked to make sure the exception is in place.

Well, that's nice :-)

> My main concern now is
> can we be sure ACT won't pull the exception overnight as they did about a
> decade ago ? (IIRC, it was around the GtkAda 2.4 timeframe)

We can't be sure. But at least it can't be done unnoticed. With a public 
Git repository it is always possible to determine if and when a license 
change occurred.
On the other hand, this runtime exception doesn't look like an accident. 
I guess if they publish their sources under this license, they will 
stick to it for a while.

Michael

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Saša Janiška]

On Ned, 2015-12-06 at 14:32 +0100, Michael B. wrote:

> I guess if they publish their sources under this license, they will 
> stick to it for a while.

As someone who has just decided to use Ada and/or GtkAda/Gnoga for his
app, it is encouraging to see every endeavors from the side of AdaCore
which can make Ada as more popular/accessible programming language,
especially for open-source projects.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
The intricacies of action are very hard to understand. 
Therefore one should know properly what action is, 
what forbidden action is, and what inaction is.

Re: AdaCore takes positive steps with virus free GtkAda

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Simon Clubley wrote:

> The question now is: can we trust ACT to not suddenly remove the
> exception in the same way as they did around a decade ago?

We can't.  But hopefully we (the Open Source Ada community) have learnt
enough to keep the "GMGPL" branch in an acceptable shape, if it happens
again.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"make it easy for folks to make changes that remain consistent
 with the documentation and discourage them from those changes
 that would result in the comments being invalidated"