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

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

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.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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