Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

[Norman Worth <nworth@comcastNOSPAM.net>]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2018-04-17, Mehdi Saada <00120260a@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have trouble believing that Adacore (free) forbid completely selling
>> softwares in other licenses as GPL or the likes of. I have no technical
>> knowledge of these things, but I feel like  your points of view are a
>> bit... one sided ?
> 
> Adacore force the GPL on any software developed using the Community
> version. See
> 
> https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison
> 
> where it says (under Community) "For open source GPL software".
> 
> Oh, and it's not "one sided", it's called giving the Ada community
> a dose of cold reality. You can talk about the advantages of Ada all
> you want but Ada's advantages mean nothing until the Ada compiler
> situation matches the compiler situation for other languages.
> 
> Any compiler which imposes the GPL on any software developed using
> it would be absolutely dead on arrival in many environments especially
> when compilers for other languages are available for free which do
> not impose such constraints.
> 
> GPL based software development is a small subset of all the software
> development out there.
> 
> Also, as far as I can see (and I am willing to be corrected here if
> I am wrong) it means that you can't even write a library in Ada under
> something other than the GPL if you are going to use the Community
> version. As soon as you compile the library source with the Community
> version, it falls under the GPL and hence any software using your
> library also falls under the GPL.
> 
> In order to create an Ada library with a LGPL or MIT licence
> (for example), you have to fall back to the FSF version which
> does not have that constraint.
> 
> Simon.
> 
One of the great fallacies propagated by the commercial software world 
is that GPL requires that software developed using tools licensed under 
it to be open source.  That is not the case.  Software developed using 
GNAT (or the other gcc family compilers) can be, and often is, 
proprietary.  The compiler itself is open source, and direct derivatives 
of it must be open source, but it stops there.  The libraries, although 
open source, are licensed so that they may be included in proprietary works.

It is expensive to develop a compiler.  The early decision to provide a 
free Ada compiler was very controversial.  It was done to make sure that 
something was out there.  The objections were mostly that it was unfair 
competition to commercial developers.  But commercial compilers did 
appear, and some of them are excellent.  Moreover, GNAT provided a cheap 
way for people to learn Ada.  On the downside, it may have turned some 
large companies away from the language by lessening the profit potential 
of the language.