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Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:17:03 -0500
From: "Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: GNAT GPL 2005: Too clever by half?
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 <87hdcew7wq.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org>
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Date: 2005-09-21T15:17:03-05:00
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Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 
> Ah, the beauty of free software will never cease to amaze me.

Which is probably why it took a week before this aspect hit me :-)

> But I can think of two flaws in your reasoning.  One, your customer
> could hire anybody to do the maintenance; they don't have to hire you.
> AdaCore solves this by hiring all the experts who are good enough to
> tamper with the compiler, but depending on your product this may or
> may not be possible.  The second flaw is if a greedy capitalist wants
> to sell Ada development tools - e.g. code coverage, static analysis or
> whatnot.  Then the customer can be expected to be quite literate with
> Ada.

I wouldn't call them flaws.

While yes, anybody could be hired, the application's developer is most 
likely going to be high on the list of prospective maintainers, since 
it's unlikely anybody else knows the product as well as they do, and can 
turn around an improvement or fix as fast.

And second, the industry isn't exactly bustin' at the seams with 
individuals that are "quite literate with Ada".  Nor is the market for 
Ada development tools.

So they're not so much "flaws" as "nits" :-)

If Ada is irrelevant to a customer, and irrelevant to an application's 
functionality, then in the end the licensing of GNAT GPL 2005 is mostly 
irrelevant, and by and large the product can be treated *just like any 
other commercial* product.

Marc