Ada Run-Time Royalties - Opinions?

[bill@uk.co.gec-mrc (R.A.L Williams)]

A colleague of mine has just completed a comparison of three i960 cross compilers
and we were surprised to find a wide divergence in policy w.r.t. licensing the
run-time system.

One vendor charges no royalty and makes the run-time source code available to
aid porting code to embedded systems; another has no royalty but charges a fee
for access to the run-time source; the third charges a royalty AND charges for
access to the source.

Now, the absolute amounts being charged for royalties and source code are not
huge and the royalty, at least, can be passed on to the customer. In my company,
however, the sheer hassle of administering licensing arrangements like this make
me say b**ger it! Our business is mainly bespoke R&D with occasional repeat
orders. Perhaps I'd have a different opinion if we were involved in production
contracts with well-defined numbers of units that we could budget for beforehand.

My question is this: what is the net opinion on royalties for run-time? Are they
a necessary evil, a dying practice or a complete pain in the nethers?

BTW, I forgot to say that, although we took only a superficial look at the
compilers, there didn't seem to be a great deal to choose between them in terms
of code quality, go faster goodies (essential to make Ada83 a useable language
for embedded systems) or support tools.

Cheers

Bill Williams