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From: Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Newcomers to comp.lang.ada: welcome and how did you end up here ?
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 19:35:25 +0100
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Date: 2014-10-09T19:35:25+01:00
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Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:

> If you were to negotiate with AdaCore, you'd find that you are entitled
> to continue to use the version(s) you obtained while you were supported
> indefinitely (even after the support contract expires).

This isn't so great: it would become increasingly obsolete and bug-fixes
would never reach me. I've been there before (even in cases where they
discontinued the product altogether).

> If you are prepared to use the FSF GCC unsupported (except by the
> goodwill of folk here, on Stack Overflow, and on IRC somewhere), and you
> can get hold of a build with Ada enabled (Debian Linux (easy),
> probably other Linux distributions, Mac OS X, ...) then you can
> develop code and release binaries under any licence that you want:
> see GCC Runtime Library Exception
(snip)

That is great news, and makes the situation much less surprising to me.
I think that in my reading I had realized that GNAT Pro is different,
but I must have conflated GNAT FSF with GNAT GPL (especially as the FSF
have typically done GPL enforcement!). Thank you very much. Further
reading suggests that GNAT FSF even supports Ada 2012. I'll thus stick
around and look more closely at a couple of recent Ada books. (-:

-- Mark