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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
From: "Doran, Steven" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 12:42:30 -0700
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Reply-To: "Doran, Steven" <[log in to unmask]>
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I should have included more detail in my last post.

For those who do not know, open source (GPL) licensing states that
if I distribute a program called Hello_World under an GPL license,
anyone can add, modify, or create the source code for Hello_World as long as
the modifications are added to future versions of Hello_World and follow
the original GPL license restrictions. For instance, you could not modify
Hello_World and create your own version called My_Hello_World and distribute
it
as a competitor to my version.

The legal implications of GPL licensing are way to complex to write about in
this email; however, Linux, Apache and Netscape are some high-profile
examples
that have been successfully disturbed under GPL. In my last post, I referred
to a
program called Samba. Samba is an open source software application that
provides seamless
file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is BIG in the Unix world
right now and
there are allot of contributors to it because Samba fills a very important
void in
Unix networking. Obviously if Samba was written in Ada, you would need to
know Ada
in order to write the modifications you wanted to add to it.

My theory is: If one or more Ada programmer(s) saw another big void in the
Unix/Linux world
and realized an application in Ada under GPL to fill it, there would be such

an interest in the application that people would learn Ada in order to
contribute to it.

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