Re: A few questions on Ada and Ada implementations

[Kulin Remailer <remailer@reece.net.au>]

> You want a cheap compiler, and you don't want GPL. Otherwise, you just
> say "unencumbered".

I don't know what things cost because I haven't ever seen pricing aside
from Janus. My willingness to spend around that price is based on the fact
that I only know one price point. I know of several other PC based
compilers (not Ada) that range from 200 to 600 dollars. So I have no idea
what's cheap or not in the Ada world. Green Hills refused to give me a
number when I called. I wonder if their pricing is based on the customer's
balance sheet.

> If there were a hypothetical Ada vendor that sold a compiler with a
> license of "you can't distribute a binary with our compiler runtime
> without paying a royalty", would that be "unencumbered"?

No, but it would probably be ok since presumably if you sell code you just
add the price of the royalty and feed it back to the vendor.

> Or if the license said "you can distribute a binary with our compiler
> runtime, but you cannot distribute the sources to the runtime"?

That sounds pretty normal and I wouldn't consider it an encumbrance. A
limitation is not necessarily an encumbrance, depending on one's view.

> Both of those are "license restrictions", and are "encumbered" from my
> point of view.

As I wrote in this thread I'm not familiar with the environment most of you
are working in and my questions reflect this ignorance. But at the end of
the day having to open your source code and potentially distribute it are
the biggest encumbrances of all, your clarifications notwithstanding.
That's the encumbrance I want to avoid. Again, I think that was obvious or
I would not have mentioned that I'm not looking for GPL-anything.