Re: Development process in the Ada community

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Lots of models have been tried with mixed success. How exactly do you say
"Here, you can have this product free of charge, but if you feel like it you
can give me some money..." and get that to generate the kind of revenue
needed to continue to support & enhance the product? For something like
Gnat, the model is "You can have the product free of charge, but enough
people will want support to pay for it and that keeps the project afloat."
It apparently works for a compiler reasonably well, but lots of products
have little to zero demand for support. Others have tried "You can have the
source code free of charge, but if you'd like pre-compiled versions with
documentation, we can do that for a price..." That works for other things
like Linux or RTEMS. Crippled versions of things at no charge with
full-features available at a price has sometimes worked - but that doesn't
work well if you are of the One True Religion of "Open Source" :-)

At the end of the day, products need people to develop/enhance/support them
and those people need to do things like eat and pay rent, so *somebody* is
going to have to pay the freight. Even the "free" software out there is paid
for via the developer(s) generosity with their time or their employer's
subsidizing the effort in some manner. I'm of the belief that if Ada
developers find a way to make Ada development pay, it will create more Ada
developers - and that's a good thing for all of us. (How many times do we
see posts with some version of "Ada may be cool, but why should I waste my
time learning it if I can't get a job doing it....?" :-)

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


"Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message
news:a9gnce$9td$2@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
>
> Is there no way of asking business clients to pay you for your
> work even if the license doesn't require them (or others) to do
> so? I, for one, have no problem of paying craftspeople if I need
> their service, and I think I'm not alone.
>