Post #3583440
2026-07-04 13:11 UTC
@dgelessus@mastodon.social Did some more research into this... there's apparently three versions of GNAT: AdaCore's GNAT Pro (commercial software), AdaCore's GNAT CE/GPL (FOSS but forces everything made with it to be GPL), and FSF's GNAT (the one I knew about, part of GCC).
GNAT CE/GPL is apparently discontinued due to the licensing confusion, leaving only GNAT Pro and FSF's GNAT, which both allow for compiling non-GPL projects. Alire distributes FSF's GNAT, which is the main way to get non-Linux builds of the compiler. Alternatively, https://github.com/alire-project/GNAT-FSF-builds/releases/
Replies (1)
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@dgelessus@mastodon.social 2026-07-04 15:42
@techokami@woof.tech That matches my understanding, yeah. The issue is that building non-GPL code using upstream GCC/FSF GNAT is only legal thanks to a GPL exception, and the GPL allows anyone to remove that exception. That's what AdaCore did for GNAT-GPL, so I wanted to confirm that the Alire builds don't do the same thing.