Re: GNAT GPL 2005: Too clever by half?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:
> Brian May wrote:
> In my job, I have been able to get a handful of companies using Ada for 
> various purposes by saying "Here's the Gnat compiler and its free and 
> you can use it for anything you want without restriction." They've gone 
> on to use it for a variety of purposes - usually some kind of internal 
> development. Some of them have subsequently coughed up some money to ACT 
> to become supported users. My own company may end up doing this at my 
> instigation. But now the scenario changes.

Not for internal development; the GPL only kicks in if you want to
distribute your program.  For internal development, GNAT GPL 2005
Edition is just fine.

But this is all the "marketing argument".

[...]
> My customers (and my company) will be looking at that situation and here 
> are their alternatives:
>
> 1) Go buy a support agreement from ACT - something that is significantly 
> more expensive than, say, buying a copy of Microsoft Visual C++.
>
> 2) Go buy a licensed copy of someone else's Ada compiler - perhaps 
> paying about as much (or maybe more) than one would for MS-VC++.
>
> 3) Go use whatever native compilers they already have for other 
> languages - such as the C compiler native on their Sun workstations. And 
> after all, C is such a ubiquitous language, with just about every 
> developer already knowing it and thousands of tools available to support 
> it and huge libraries of stuff already available to link to and that's 
> what the OS is written in so its just plain easier to get to the OS 
> services, and all their tools like Matlab, Simulink, etc. all generate C 
> code anyway and etc. etc. etc.

4) Use Debian, AIDE, Red Hat, MinGW, or any of the other binary
   distributions that ship GNAT or GCC with Ada support under GMGPL.

5) Compile GCC and all required libraries yourself from the sources in
   the CVS repositories.  These are under GMGPL.

6) Use GNAT GPL 2005 Edition unless and until they plan to distribute
   their program in binary-only form.

> Which way do you guess they'll go? Hint: It was an uphill battle to get 
> them to use Ada at all - even with a free compiler with no restrictions 
> on their code.
> 
> Unless my customers are doing *embedded* development, they really don't 
> need much in the way of support from a compiler vendor. What they need 
> is s shrink-wrap copy of a compiler with an unrestrictive license on 
> their end-product-code and some level of acceptable reliability and 
> documentation. They probably won't go to ACT to get that since the bill 
> would be excessive for the minimal amount of support they'd need. Since 
> Microsoft is willing to sell them that for something less than $1000, 
> guess what way they'll go now?
>
> Now if ACT wanted to package up a shrink-wrap developer's kit and sell 
> it for a few hundred bucks, (imposing no restrictions on the developer's 
> code) then I'd bet a few of the people I've got using Gnat might 
> actually spring for it.

Agreed.

> Perhaps there's a good capitalist business opportunity here?

Yes, probably; I've said that before in this thread.  There appears to
be a small market of people and companies willing to pay for minimal
support.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.