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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,35ce1c7836290812 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long) Date: 1999/03/07 Message-ID: <7bubmk$68g$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 452248888 References: <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com> <7bhlb2$h4n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com> <7bkasm$rlt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com> <7bmbr5$j3p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com> <7bov12$r8o$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36E2531E.37AEECF1@chocolatesaltyballs.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x2.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 166.72.70.180 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun Mar 07 17:06:33 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-03-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <36E2531E.37AEECF1@chocolatesaltyballs.com>, root wrote: > someone who works for a company who have bought 3.11b2, > should do the honourable, get permission from their > company and post it to alt.binaries.source. In fact 3.11p and 3.11b2 are indeed virtually identical (differing only in stuff related to the version name. When we make public releases they are not somehow crippled or incomplete, they are the full code at the time of release. As to whether it is viable for serious mission critical projects to use unsupported software, that is something that the project has to decide for itself. Our viewpoint that the public version is more suited to student and research use is an issue of support not bits! It is true that some of our supported customers are using more advanced versions of GNAT technology that is in alpha or beta testing status. We generally ask that such test versions NOT be distributed, since it definitely is NOT helpful to have dozens of slightly different versions of GNAT around, which have not been fully tested. It would not be illegal for a company to distribute a test version in this situation, but it would be unhelpful to the community, and I doubt "honorable" would be the right term for this :-) In fact this is an old practice in the open source community, and is used everywhere. For example, some of Cygnus' customers have access to Cygnus internal developments which are beyond the EGCS development, but they are in a stage where it is not helpful to generally distribute them, since work is needed to integrate them into the current EGCS sources. Cygnus will do this work in due course, so this technology will become available. Richard Stallman has been quite comfortable with this kind of request and understanding, and the FSF has often operated this way in the past, and it has worked out well. Hackers and hobbyists are often in a mode where they want the latest and greatest whether or not it is fully tested and working, and that is understandable. However, one of the great fears that the "real world" has of free/open source software is that it is out of control, and that it is a free for all where no one knows what version they have of anything or what's in it. In actual fact, the important developments in open source software (EMACS, GCC, GDB, LINUX, GNAT etc) are in fact managed in a much more responsible way, and there are stable well tested periodic releases, in much the same manner as for proprietary software (well I think we do a little better than Microsoft in getting out new versions of GNAT :-) P.S. GNAT 3.12 technology is on the way. We have most of the work done for this new release, which has many new interesting capabilities, and we are working towards an early release, which will include a public version 3.12p. We have no definite schedule yet, but we can say that the wait for 3.12p will be much shorter than the 3.10p to 3.11p gap (which was too long and too big a jump!) Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies P.S. It's interesting, we have variations on this thread every now and then, typically sparked by a new GNAT enthusiast who was not around for the old threads. Never mind, it is a good opportunity to sort out confusions with the GPL. One of the important accomplishments of the last few years is that now almost all major companies are MUCH more comfortable using open source software than they used to be! -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own