Re: RE: [ANNOUNCE] XML/Ada 0.5 released

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <mailman.989219766.20003.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, Robert C. Leif,
Ph.D. says...
>I still believe that in the long run, a significant part of the Ada
>community could make a large amount of money by going beyond the outdated
>Free Software philosophy and pursuing an effective approach to assist

Personally, I'm not all that interested in making "a large amount of money" off
of Ada. What I'd like to do is increase the utility and usage of the language,
and trust that the rising tide raises all boats.

I'm not sure where you get "outdated" from. As near as I can tell, the Free
Software licenses are still quite effective at achieving their goals, when
appropriately used. Nothing has happened that I can see to make them obsolete.

The problem here, and David nailed this dead-on in a previous post, is that the
GPL simultaniously encourages further use of the GPL, and discourages use of the
environment in question. This is no new insight; its talked about at length in
the LGPL rationale. If there is no feasable alternative to the environment in
which the GPL'ed code exists, then the net effect is going to be positive (at
least from the perspective of someone who wants to see more GPL'ed code).
However, if there are lots of other alternatives, then the GPL just becomes a
poison pill. That is why the LGPL (and the GMGPL) exists.

In this case, there are certianly no cost (or low cost) alternatives to using
ACT's XML parser on most platforms, but they mostly involve not using Ada. Of
course that's the situation we had *before* the XML parser was released, so its
not like ACT is hurting Ada, they just aren't helping it as much as they could.
But considering that no *other* Ada compiler vendor has seen fit to release
GMGPL'ed code at all, there's no sense bashing ACT about this. 

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