From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ac39a12d5faf5b14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 11232c,992bfa9d3803bf5b X-Google-Attributes: gid11232c,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-04-19 07:21:00 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,misc.misc Subject: Re: Open Source: in conflict with the development process in the Ada community? Date: 19 Apr 2002 07:20:59 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0204190620.1902ede@posting.google.com> References: <3CB94312.5040802@snafu.de> <4519e058.0204150645.62003096@posting.google.com> <3CBCEB15.E104D1F5@adaworks.com> <35c5c360dfe83cb34ea9648445bd0e95.48257@mygate.mailgate.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.244 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1019226060 25445 127.0.0.1 (19 Apr 2002 14:21:00 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 19 Apr 2002 14:21:00 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:22783 misc.misc:6671 Date: 2002-04-19T14:21:00+00:00 List-Id: "Marin David Condic" wrote in message news:... > Even GNAT could arrive at a point where customers say "It works > well enough for me to do my job and I don't need any add-on, custom > features, so thanks for your support, but we'll be terminating our contract > now..." Well I don't remember if Marin was ever a customer or not, I think not, but in fact this misunderstands the support we provide. It goes far beyond fixing bugs, and providing custom features. What we provide most importantly is consulting and help on the use of Ada, both at the language and applications level, and at the level of dealing with problems of interactions with operating systems, and other software components. So Microsoft may have a problem in its long term marketing, but that's not comparable at all, since by our standards Microsoft does not provide support (and that's not surprising because they don't charge for it -- having top qualified engineers available for immediate assistance is not inexpensive) Certainly part of our support services involves fixing bugs, but that's a declining part of the total support traffic, and that's fine with us. At the same time, our total customer base for support services is growing steadily. Why? Not hard to see. We are in an industry where a days delay for one engineer costs something like $1000, *NOT* counting the collateral costs of delays. It's pretty easy for us to save a company money once you take this into account. As to the question of whether other products can be marketed in this manner. I see no reason why not. For example, for a word processor, I am certainly NOT about to mess around and build from sources if I can buy a prebuilt and pretested executable in a convenient distribution. If in addition, the product comes with real support, I am definitely willing to pay more. I agree that a word processor probably requires less support, and in particular that it does not require top engineering experts to provide this support, so I would expect such support to be less expensive than GNAT. People just assume that using a license that is favorable to users means that it is imnpossible to make money. But most of this assumption comes from gut feeling, tuned by years of exposure to alternative models, rather than hard facts. My viewpoint is that you make money by providing customers with something they need. One of the needs is for licenses that are less restrictive and do not get in the way of people doing what they need to do. We are in the business of responding to this need. We guess that others could succeed by being attentive to their users in a similar manner. Think about the whole discussion of COTS products. What are the two main concerns about COTS: 1. Support being tied to a single company 2. Long term availability of this support 3. Ability to customize if needed The open source free software model responds effectively to all these concerns. At the same time, people who are interested in the economies of scale that come from the use of COTS products are definitely NOT interested in using unsupported software. I think there is a perfect synergy between producer and consumer here, and I think it could be applied to many other software products successfully.