Re: An Ada IDE and discussions

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Still sounds suspiciously like someone trying to get me to work for free.
:-)

If I had a business - or worked for one - in which GtkAda or some similar
products were part of the end product, I could see an argument for
contributing to the project. The "Rising Tide Lifts All Boats" argument
might be one reason I'd want to extend the basic product then let my
competitors have the enhancements. I might see a case where I sell the
enhancements for $$$ and maybe not make them available to my competitors.
(In this case, we're talking about a manual - not software - so I'm some
kind of value-added repackager.)

If my company were already in the process of utilizing this tool, I again
might (I stress, "might") find some reason as a customer why it is to my
benefit to make some enhancements and make those enhancements available to
the folks who sold me the tool - or the general public. A larger user
community might have some advantage to me, so providing enhancements may
encourage more use & I might gain from that. Maybe. (Why not just buy a tool
for a few hundred bucks that already has what I need - including the large
user community? A developer's time is *very* expensive in comparison.)

But if I'm just a part-time, home-brew, hacker, I don't see much advantage
to it. I develop some enhancements as a "Labor of Love" and give it away so
that some for-profit company can use it to generate more revenue? How do I
gain? Why not just keep it for myself?

Likewise, if my company does not have some kind of vested interest in the
toolset and is just shopping around for a toolset to get some job done,
where is there an incentive for me to do this? If my company wanted to be a
tool-building company, presumably we'd have done that already. If we just
have some job to do, we want to do it with our efforts concentrated on the
job - not tool building. Hence, we go select some tool that will do the job
and move on. If the tool doesn't do 100% of what we want, we evaluate other
tools to see how close we can get. If we find something that does 100% of
what we want, we might look at the price tag and make the classic "Make Or
Buy" decision - guess which way that is likely to go... So unless I
absolutely can't live without *this* tool and it absolutely needs *this*
enhancement and I can't pay someone to make the enhancement less that what
it would cost me to do it myself, where is the incentive for me to enhance
it? And if I do, where is the incentive to share it?

I guess I just don't see much advantage to doing that sort of work unless I
stand to gain in some way. How is it I gain if I am not either a tool vendor
or don't have a choice about toolsets and need some enhancement? I think
that is part of the problem with the GPL. It won't breed developers forever
because it doesn't incentivize them much. Sooner or later even computer
geeks will catch on. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Pascal Obry" <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:uzoa3phda.fsf@wanadoo.fr...
>
> Well this is an Open Source project. In a sense this is OUR product. You
can
> build nice documentation for it, add some features that will make it the
best
> GUI builder in the world... and sell it if you like or sell you support or
> whatever. Of course you'll need to also distribute the sources.
>