Re: ACL - The Ada Community License

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> (please CC responses to me thanks; sorry if this has already been
> raised; I searched the archives but found nothing)
> 
> Any thoughts on this license?
> 
> Is it DFSG?

Yes, I think so.

> Is it compatable with the GPL?

Maybe not.  Section 7 says

>          7  System-level subroutines supplied by you and linked
>             into this Ada library in order to emulate the
>             functionality defined by this Ada library shall not be
>             considered part of this Ada library, but are the
>             equivalent of input as in Paragraph 6, provided these
>             subroutines do not change the library in any way that
>             would cause it to fail the regression tests for the
>             library.

This is similar to the "operating system" exception, except that the
vendor of the operating system can't do anything that breaks Ada.  For
example, the Sun libc has pow() defined.  The Ada library might define
it's own pow() for small integers that does not give bit-wise
identical results to the Sun pow().  If the Sun one is used, it might
cause regression tests to fail, meaning that Sun could not distribute
the Ada library.  The GPL only restricts Sun from distributing libc
and the Ada library together.  This would count as an additional
restriction, and thus not compatible with the GPL.

If you have any influence, changing this part to read more like the
GPL would be enough to make it compatible.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org