Re: Towards a free GNU Ada

[Chris Morgan <mihalis@ix.netcom.com.spam>]

James Rogers wrote:
 
[SNIP]
> Perhaps it is time to remove some conflict from the ACT charter.
> It seems the only way to do this is to either find a continuing
> source of funding for development and maintenance of GNAT, or to
> find some alternate group to perform maintenance of a public
> version of GNAT, effectively creating a separate version from the
> product produced by ACT.
[SNIP]

With respect I think this is a load of nonsense!

You can get a copy of a working GNAT for dozens of platforms including
almost all the important ones. You can even get the source code and
build it yourself. And you are legally allowed to give those items to
anyone else you please. If you find a bug you can report it to the
maintainers and generally any real bug that might affect the paying
customers of ACT gets fixed pretty damn quickly, whilst _all_ bugs are
at least noted. Given all this, the fact that the sofware is actually
still being actively (and if I may say so very rapidly) by a single team
can only be a bonus as far as I'm concerned. I speak as someone who
recently got GNAT authorised for some work at a large British defence
contractor. I've since changed jobs but I understand they're moving to
using it even more widely.

Please don't take any offence at this, and in fact feel free to write me
and discuss it privately, but really until you demonstrate anything
really holding back any unsupported GNAT users you have no case.

Chris

-- 
Chris Morgan <mihalis @ ix.netcom.com>
  "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,"