The Site for Libre Software Developers

Purpose of this Site

The purpose of this site is twofold:

Software Developers: This site contains tools to help programmers, students, teachers, and hobbyists develop software. Libre Software. The objective is to offer a GNU agile and scalable programming environment for Libre Software development. We intend to integrate our work into the GNOME project. Links to the tools are available on the left menu.
Students & Teachers: This site contains a teachers and students corner where you can share and download courses on software development and Ada 95 programming as well as other educational material such as student labs. Links to the courses are available on the right menu.

Contributions welcome :)

What is Libre Software?

Libre Software is the European term for free software, a term coined by Richard Stallman to denote the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. We have chosen to use the word "Libre" over "Free" because it avoids the "free beer" confusion. As Richard Stallman puts it:

"Free Software" is a matter of liberty, not price. [...] you should think of "free speech", not "free beer."

This is NOT a "Freeware" Site

The tools and software that you can download from this site are intended for developers of Libre Software, students, teachers and hobbyists. If you are planning to develop software in a commercial setting (as Libre Software or otherwise) services are available to save you time and company money. Contact sales@act-europe.fr or sales@gnat.com.

Supported Platforms

Binaries for the tools are available for GNU/Linux, Solaris and Windows. Because everything in this site is Libre Software, the sources of all the tools are included. If binaries for your favorite platform are not available you can just build them.

Programming Languages Supported by the Tools

Currently, the tools support Ada 95 and C. Some tools also support C++. The tools are engineered so that support for additional programming languages such can be added easily. All contributions to extend tool support to other languages will be warmly welcomed.

What Languages are the Tools Written In ?

Because we are Ada fans, most of the tools are written in Ada 95. Some tools are written partly in Ada 95 and partly C. Emacs modes are written in Emacs Lisp.

From this site you can get GNAT, the GNU Ada 95 development environment. So you, too, can write software in Ada if you wish.

What is Ada ?

Ada is a powerful, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. It has built-in concurrency features, exception handling, generic templates, support for distributed execution, as well as standard interfaces to other programming languages and libraries. Ada's syntax was inspired by Pascal and Modula, helping to make Ada programs easy to read and understand.

Why Ada?

Some of us participated in the design and the first implementation of Ada back in the early 80s. Some of us liked Pascal and Delphi and were looking for an "industrial-strength" equivalent. Some of us teach and like the good programming concepts that Ada puts forth and the ease of teaching modern software idioms such as object-oriented and concurrent programming. Some of us were tired of fighting with the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies of C and C++ (see the C/C++/Java pitfalls slides in the course Developing Software that Matters).

Contributors

We welcome all Libre Software contributions, written in Ada or otherwise. If you would like to contribute your software or send us patches please contact us at libre@act-europe.fr.

Who Are We ?

ACT Europe and Ada Core Technologies are the companies behind GNAT, the GNU Ada 95 development environment. Our mission is to support the use of Libre Software development technologies such as GNAT, GCC, and GDB in industry and academia.