Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

["John P. Pietrzak" <john@pietrzak.org>]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Richard Kenner wrote:

>     The fact of the matter is that the development was very open, at
>     least to anyone who had proper Intel paperwork.  HP did the initial
>     gcc and binutils work; Cygnus refined both and began optimization
>     work; folks from CERN, Intel, IBM, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux, and VA
>     were testing new code regularly.
> 
> But there's no legal way to restrict GPL'ed material to "those who had the
> proper Intel paperwork"!
> 

Logically, sure you can.  As I understand it, the restrictions in the GPL
are upon what controls the distributor can impose over the person
receiving the GPL'd product.  There is no requirement that either the
distributor or the consumer _have_ to re-distribute that product to other
parties; and I believe there's no restriction upon separate agreements
with a third party concerning the contents of that material.

Therefore, an NDA holder could potentially distribute GPL'ed material to
other NDA holders without any problem, and this material could
be freely re-distributed under the to non-NDA holders without violating
the GPL, but someone along the line would have to violate their NDA.

But all this is way off-topic for this mailing list, I think...


--John