Re: GNAT Support Costs

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <38A2DE89.BB2A8C5D@gmx.de>,
  Andreas Winckler <andreas.winckler@gmx.de> wrote:
> Only innumerous small teams and projects create a mass market
> which is what lacks Ada. Not concentrating on the market for
> small projects and companies ist the right way to kill Ada.

Well of course several companies in the past and in the present
try to meet this need -- in particular Aonix has an inexpensive
version of Ada 95 available for NT that will meet some of these
needs, and indeed the public version of GNAT meets some of these
needs at even lower cost :-)

Ada Core does not concentrate on this market for two reasons:

1. We don't think there is a market there, despite your
unsubstantiated claims above. Previous attempts to concentrate
on this market have proved an excellent way of losing a lot
of money! Note that Borland lost money trying to pursue this
market for C -- they could not duplicate their previous success
with Pascal -- and that is despite selling hundreds of thousands
of copies of their C compiler.

2. We prefer to concentrate on what we are good at, which is
providing high level support. There are many real success
stories for Ada, and many of them tend to be large scale
projects for which our style of high level support is ideal.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.