Re: Fed OOPS ... OOPS! We forgot to include Ada!

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Well I guess we must be doing *something* right to draw such fire from
the eminent Greg Aharonian and Colin James III :-)

Just so everyone else has a clear picture of what ACT is up to, the idea is
to generate continuing support for the development of GNAT by offering
commercial support services to any users of GNAT who need such commercial
support. 

Two important points here. 

First: GNAT will continue to be freely available, any maintenance we do,
including any fixes, modifications and improvements made in response to
trouble reports from paid support customers, will be made available by
FTP and on CD/ROM etc to everyone.

Second: ACT won't in any sense own GNAT, it couldn't if it wanted to, which
it certainly doesn't. We provide only servce, and presumably people will
sign up for this support if they need it, and if ACT provides appropriate
value.

A complex product like GNAT is clearly out of range to be maintained purely
on the basis of volunteer efforts, and we are definitely interested in
seeing GNAT survive and prosper. We don't think that it is reasonable to
expect the government to continue to foot the cost of this maintenance, and
the Cygnus experience indicates that it is viable for a free software
product to survive and prosper on this basis.

Incidentally, we fully expect other companies to provide support and
services for GNAT. Already Labtek has forged ahead with the NT version,
and SGI is integrating the SGI version into their advanced software
environment tools. We are happy to work closely with anyone who wants
to get involved with the GNAT work.