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The licensing for the Ada ecosystem is confusing to me. It seems that the major vendors are Adacore, Green Hills, and Atego. Am I correct that for commercial
by lambdaelite 11y ago
The licensing for the Ada ecosystem is confusing to me. It seems that the major vendors are Adacore, Green Hills, and Atego. Am I correct that for commercial products, there are no free toolchains available?
- Avshalom 11y agothe FSF version of gnat is robust, mature, and reasonably up to date. It's licensed LGPL so you can use it pretty much like anything else. Adacore also puts out a slightly more state of the art version of gnat but it's GPL so in theory everything you make with it needs to be gpl as well (though of course that's fairly irrelevent for many classes of software)
- Narishma 11y agoWhat's wrong with the GNU compiler?
- lambdaelite 11y agoNothing per se. I was confused in that both Adacore and FSF offer a compiler with the same name but different licensing. As to my specific situation, I cannot release source code and so the Adacore GPL licensed product is a no-go.
- _kst_ 11y agoUsing a GPL-licensed compiler doesn't mean you have to release the source code that you compile with it. (I am not a lawyer; do not rely on my advice without thoroughly verifying it.)
- lambdaelite 11y agoPerhaps it has to do with the runtime being GPL'd? Regardless, the Adacore FAQ specifically councels that the GPL version is suitable for free software only.[0] Admittedly, I find the licensing situation confusing and could be completely in the wrong here. [0] http://libre.adacore.com/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/faq/ http://libre.adacore.com/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/faq/