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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Dec Ditching Ada?
Date: 1996/09/05
Message-ID: <1996Sep5.092514.1@eisner>#1/1
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references: <4vi32h$bu1@jake.esu.edu> <321CF074.6E54@mdc.com>
 <dewar.840898041@schonberg> <3221E317.5D2B@mdc.com>
 <50jqic$293h@ilx018.iil.intel.com>
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newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.os.vms
Date: 1996-09-05T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <50jqic$293h@ilx018.iil.intel.com>, Uri Raz <uraz@iil.intel.com> writes:

>   And I wonder how will DEC circumvent the GNU license to continue selling
>   the ADA compiler without sources and without dropping one cent of their
>   license's price.

Nobody said DEC would sell the result, just that DEC was funding the
compiler development.  DEC makes money selling hardware and operating
systems, and apparently sees having Ada 95 available on their machines
as important, but not a sufficient revenue generator to upgrade DEC Ada.
Perhaps they do not see it as a revenue generator due to the presence of
GNAT.  Although I think DEC Ada is great, and in general I prefer to
use commercial products, I think the availability of a wide variety of
economic options is important in Ada compilers as in many other parts
of life.  If I wanted to write a commercial product which emitted code
to be fed to an Ada compiler, I would certainly cherish the availability
of GNAT to my (potential) customers.

>   Also wonder what will happen to the PDO license DEC sold - will they become
>   useless, or would they have some use after all ?

DEC has certainly indicated they will continue selling DEC Ada (83).
Whether GNAT performance can match the speed of the PDO is quite an
interesting question.