Lovelace: An Ada Tutor - Legal Details

Also, credit where credit is due. Much of the information in this tutorial is based on the Ada 9X Reference Manual and the Ada 9X Rationale (and understandably so). Both were developed by the Ada 9X Mapping/Revision Team based at Intermetrics, Inc., sponsored by the Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO) through the Ada 9X project. I've intentionally tried to not duplicate any existing on-line Ada tutor.

There's no warranty. Here's an official legal statement:

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
    See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Ownership issues need to be made clear. The electronic version of Lovelace, where not noted otherwise, is Copyright (C) 1994-2002 David A. Wheeler. All pages of the electronic version of the Lovelace tutorial are released for use under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This is also called a "copyleft". The tutorial generator used to generate the tutorial is also covered by the GPL; the tutorial text and tutorial generator are components of the program ``Lovelace.'' For the both the tutorial text and the tutorial generator the following applies:

 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 (at your option) any later version.

 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

There are three exceptions:

• You do not have the right to print out the entire contents of the Lovelace Ada tutorial. I am not giving away the rights to the printed version of Lovelace. You may print up to one-third of the material (measured as files or chapters). Quoting short snippets is okay as long as credit is given to the author (David A. Wheeler). The statements above only apply to the electronic version of Lovelace. I'm withholding rights to the printed version of Lovelace so that the book version could be developed. Publishing Lovelace as a book makes Lovelace more accessible to more people, but publishers (rightly) want to make a profit on the sales of such books. Please don't try to print out Lovelace as a book; you'll find that just printing out Lovelace doesn't work well anyway. If you want a printed version, see the information on the book version of Lovelace.
• The tutorial generator's library file is covered by the Library GPL instead of the regular GPL. This provides some additional rights to you. The restriction against printing (listed above) doesn't apply to the generator.
• Program Small has a more generous legal status, though for most people this will make no practical difference. The restriction against printing (listed above) doesn't apply to Small either. For legal purposes, program Small includes the Ada source code for program Small and the lesson on Small (lesson 18). The overall result is that you may use "Small" or any piece of it for commercial or non-commercial use without royalty. Program "Small" was developed by me (David A. Wheeler), but it was given to the Ada Resource Association (ARA) as an entry for its "Ada Lovelace Programming Competition" under the condition that the ARA must permit unrestricted use by the public of program Small. (As an aside: Yes, it won!). Thus, the author is actually not the copyright holder of this particular version of Small, but instead the ARA is. The ARA's address is:

    Ada Resource Association
    4719 Reed Road, Suite 305
    Columbus, Ohio 43220
  

Fifth, various products are mentioned in this tutorial, and their names are generally trademarked by their respective vendor or developer. In particular, Microsoft is the vendor of MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and Windows 95; IBM is the vendor of OS/2; Sun is the vendor of Solaris.

This tutorial, Lovelace, was developed on my own time (off-hours). Many people have helped to identify errors or other problems with earlier versions of the tutorial. The background images were provided by NCSA. The animated moving arrow is an animated GIF from The Rocket Shop. Many of the images are from Randy's Icon and Image Bazaar. My thanks to all.

Feel free to include this tutorial as part of both commercial and non-commercial products, and feel free to edit the text. Where you HAVE modified the text, make sure that you note who did so and to what. As required by the GPL, if you modify this tutorial and/or distribute it in any way, you must make it freely available for unlimited distribution without royalties.

If you distribute this tutorial as part of a commercial offering, you may NOT restrict redistribution of this tutorial (though you may, of course, restrict redistribution of other items). Thus, I suggest if you're a commercial company and you're thinking of including this tutorial with your product:

1. Make sure that this tutorial is clearly separable from the rest of your product (making the tutorial easy to invoke from the rest of your product and vice versa is fine). Since users have the right to redistribute the tutorial, this will decrease the likelihood that they will accidentally redistribute your products as well. One simple way to do this is to put Lovelace in its own directory (once decompressed if compressed).
2. Please send me a courtesy note that you're using it. This is in your own best interest; I may be aware of changes that will help you.

Thanks very much!

--- David A. Wheeler.

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