Re: work-in-progress Augusta Ada compiler for LLVM written in Scala

[Optikos <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 6:49:06 AM UTC-5, Lucretia wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 June 2019 12:35:03 UTC+1, Optikos  wrote:
> 
> > Some noncommentary development resumed 4 months ago after the importation of the source code
> > into the SBT build environment.  Since then, check-in comments such as “Some work on the LLVM
> > code generator. Also fixed a few easy warnings.” and “Fixed the structure of the liveness analysis
> > method.” indicate incrementally more serious activity in recent months.
> 
> You could email him and ask him to update here, he does frequent this group.

I will eventually if he doesn't post-in-reply soon.

> > I cannot find a license stated anywhere regarding Augusta (although I have only done spot-checking
> > here & there).  Under which license is Augusta distributed?
> 
> https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/search?q=license&unscoped_q=license

Yes, I did that search too, but if you notice in the search results that these are licenses inherited from importations of other projects.  It seems at 1st glance that SLEM (LGPLed library) is linked to Augusta and thus the LGPL does not spread outside of SLEM.  The WAC pieces borrowed from OpenWatcom (Sybase OpenWatcom-licensed) do not spread elsewhere.  The remaining search results are for documentation under the GNU documentation license.

As I stated before, there seems to be no indication what the license is for Augusta proper (i.e., the executable), outside of the SLEM library, outside of WAC, and outside of documentation.

> > With Augusta intended to be the OpenWatcom Ada Compiler (WAC) as stated in the
> > webpage linked below, I would assume that the OpenWatcom license would be utilized for Augusta,
> > although the LLVM-backend activity in recent months instead of the expected OpenWatcom-backend
> > activity might indicate a change away from this intent to be the WAC.
> > https://github.com/pchapin/augusta/tree/master/wac
> 
> As the readme says, this is a separate project to Augusta which is meant to use the OpenWatcom back
> end and is written in C++.

Yes, but if contributed to OpenWatcom, I am under the belief that they require the entirety of the source code to be licensed under the Sybase OpenWatcom License.

> I really wish he would separate out his projects in this repo, there are 3 compilers and a bunch of tools
> which could be separate and I think slinging them all in one just confuses people.

I concur.  If he continues with one repository, Peter Chapin could reorganize the directory structure so that at the top level are the differently-licensed portions, each with their own COPYING or LICENSE file, so that it is clear which portion is LGPL, which portion is Sybase OpenWatcom, and which portion is some other license.  (I think that documentation is obviously documentation and doesn't need its own top-level directory despite being licensed under yet another license:  the GNU Free Documentation License.)

It appears as though Augusta is not intended to be licensed under the GPL though.  Without any copyright notice at all on Augusta proper, some legal jurisdictions would default to all rights-to-copy reserved by Peter Chapin, whereas in other legal jurisdictions the default would be public domain.  Peter should clean that ambiguity up.