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From: Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>
Subject: Re: Apex vs GNAT on solaris
Date: 1999/12/10
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In article <1999Dec9.104359.1@eisner>,
  Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam wrote:
> But ACT does not really sell compilers (or compiler licenses).
> They sell support.

That's not true at all, we do indeed sell compiler licenses
together with support. True we place much more emphasis on
support, and provide a very permissive license, but I don't
think that there is that much basic difference in sales terms.
Sure, the permissive license maybe (and very often is) a strong
selling point, as is the commitment to high level support, but
from a typical users point of view, they are indeed "buying a
compiler".

> It seems to me that someone who did not understand the effect
> that options might have on performance would be a relatively
> expensive customer to support.

Well. First we certainly do not try to do some selection of
customers on the basis of how much support they will need, and
if we did, it wouldn't work, neither we nor the customer can
really guess how much support they will need in the future.

Second, I am not even sure that your claim is even approximately
true. Sometimes it is the really knowledgable uses who make the
most use of our support services. In any case we certainly do
not try to discourage customers from using our support services,
because we want them to find out how valuable they can be :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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