Re: Dec Ditching Ada?

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <dewar.841979749@schonberg>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> Larry said
> 
> "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."
> 
> Please note that GNAT *is* a commercial product. Perhaps you meant
> proprietary here?

I know there is a quote from the Red Queen about words meaning what
I choose, but in my lexicon GNAT is not commercial in that there is
no limit to how many systems I use it on (absent any service agreement
concerns).

You may ask why I should care, and I believe the answer is that with
the GPL-support economic model, you are not making enough money for me
to feel comfortable.  Regardless of how much money you may make, it is
possible I would never feel comfortable.

I am sure all Ada fans would agree that distinct meanings where
possible are better than overloading.  The distinct economic models
I see are:

	Commercial - traditional approach with limits on use
	Freeware - absolutely no restrictions
	Shareware - moral duty to pay in accordance with use
	GPL - no limit on use, optionally pay for support

leaving out the discussion on redistrbution for profit because it
is another dimension not currently under discussion.

Just as neither Robert nor I can retrieve the meaning of the word
"hacker" from the current mass media meaning of "bad guy", I believe
the term "proprietary" cannot have clear meaning other than the
widespread advertising use of "old bad stuff because it did not come
from our company".  It has been widely applied to fully documented
_protocols_ available for anyone to implement, merely to take the
meaning "not TCP/IP".

If I say to a consulting client "let's use a _commercial_ product",
that has the meaning, developed over the years, of an approach
which necessitates a per-seat charge (or site-license). To
ask for a change in meaning is akin to asking for a change in
the Ada 95 tagged type syntax to make it be like C++ :-).

Larry

P.S.  None of the above is to say that I would not adopt GNAT
	for certain situations.  I recently chose a non-GNAT
	Ada 95 product because I was impressed with surrounding
	tools which came in the box.  There are some platforms
	where commercial (my meaning) Ada 95 products will be
	extremely expensive or not available.  I am really
	counting on the standardization of the language to
	give me portability between compilers implementations.