Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
Jeffrey Creem wrote :

Hopefully someone at Greenhills is paying attention to this discussion.
This confusing license perhaps "exposing" a company to GPL terms when
the headers clearly are not GPL will make a great writeup that will
pretty much make it impossible to even use GNATPro within my company.


I don't understand. Did your company not receive a license statement
from AdaCore along with GNAT Pro? Which company do you think is being
"exposed to the GPL terms"? And what does GreenHills have to do with
it? I wouldn't expect any problems, since AdaCore and GreeHills have a
formal agreement.


I should have been clearer here (though I think others have somewhat answered some of this).

1) Actually, I am pretty sure when we have purchased GNATPro in the past that we have not gotten a license agreement **signed** by someone in authority at AdaCore. Certainly we do get license agreements.

2) I mentioned Greenhills because they have been publishing papers about this risks of Open source/Linux (http://www.ghs.com/linux.html) and or Non-Greenhills products(some would call this stuff FUD. At times I agree but generally you can't argue with the basic truths in the papers. You probably can disagree with some of the conclusions).

3) The biggest reason this murky license is likely to eventually result in AdaCore being banned is that many large companies are already leary of anything marked GPL in any fashion. (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/jk9xy Note that this tiny URL is pointing to a PDF at a lockheed martin server)..I'll save you the trouble of looking. The summary is that they ban their suppliers from providing anything GPL to them. Yes there are ways out/around it..But it is not uncommon for this to be read as a defacto ban by some.

In any case, all of the assurances from the person who stands to make money on the SW won't matter if the FUD level (and truth level) gets high enough. There is an extremely good chance that another vendor's compiler will be picked due to the GPL "stink" on AdaCore and these misleading license terms on the CVS archive do nothing to help that cause.




At this point, it would seem the only purpose of the public CVS archives
is to entrap people to allow AdaCore to sue at will. Comments and
threads like this are of course likely to cause AdaCore to pull the CVS
archives and that will be somewhat of a shame for free software
developers but in its current state, the public CVS archives are doing
more harm than good.


No, I don't think AdaCore want to sue anyone. I would rather think they
are die-hard, purist Free Software believers, like RMS (i.e. "free up
your software or pay"). Furthermore, they do not seem very eager to
serve the market of SMEs and one-man shops, who have been asking for


Obviously one can't get into their heads but I'd be willing to bet that the change in terms has everything to do with business (not wanting to be their own competition) and nothing to do with free software purism. In fact, I sure hope that is the case since they are not a not-for-profit enterprise. And I agree that they are unlikely to sue anyone but <wild speculation to illustrate a point>in 3 years when all the rest of the business dries up and we are all programming in XYZZY who knows the last dying breaths of the company might look like </wild speculation to illustrate a point>


affordable GMGPL licenses for a long time. Well, that's their business
decision. As Marc A. Criley said so rightly, this decision just leaves
more room to Aonix and RR Software in that market.


True. Hopefully Aonix, RR Software, Greenhills and the other vendors remain vialble alternatives. Having more vendors is obviously a good thing.


I do agree that AdaCore's decision does more harm than good to Ada's
attractivity to SMEs. They are the only ones being hurt. The change of
license has no effect on corporations large enough to use GNAT Pro, or
on students, hobbyists, or free software developers.


I think I can say with high confidence that the change in license does indeed have an effect on corporations large enough to use GNATPro. It adds to the anti-gpl-of-any-kind FUD and will almost certainly cause other vendors to be selected in some cases. Hopefully the "free version" terms change gains them more customers than it costs them. I suspect it probably will.
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