Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

["Juha Valimaki" <juha.valimaki@xdsloy.com>]

"Marin D. Condic" <not.valid@acm.org> wrote in message
news:ak2q68$mlr$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
>
> There is a lot more that goes into effective business decision making than
> just guessing that someone will buy a product at a given price. You have
to
> do some strategic analysis of the market to base your business on a
> sustainable model.
>

Yes, I agree with you. It's just shame that sometimes all users don't fit in
the same business model. The two bad things I see in ACT business model is
that (1) it makes it hard for other companies to offer cheap, but not free,
Ada tools and (2) it discriminates small development teams.

Even hobbyist people are willing to pay money for software. It may not be a
large sum for individual users, but if there are enough such users it may be
possible. Because of the current situation competing against high quality
product that is free would be hard. I have a feeling that my view of the
siuation may seem too black and white for many. Hobby users surely take free
stuff happily and maybe also the small companies would be happy to use free
tools, but these companies just don't exist because Ada isn't interesting
enough?

The ACT model seems ok for larger companies and I think the price also isn't
too bad for a large company with only one target platform, but their model
excludes and discriminates small teams. I am sure their support is extremely
good, but it's hard to imagine how I would alone get enough advice from them
to justify the cost (especially if I need binaries for N platforms). I am
hoping for alternatives because of my own situation and because I believe
there are other small development teams that can't affort the premium, can't
find alternative tools and so simply choose some other language.

I already changed plans about my product so that I don't necessarily need
Mac or SGI platforms and I also invested in ObjectAda. I still have the
option to use GCC 3.1 or the GNAT public edition, if needed, but I would not
like to depend on something that I can't financially support (in my small
way). (Mac would have been risk anyway as it's not officially supported by
any company).

I think I have said enough questionable/speculative things about ACT/GNAT,
especially when I don't know the whole history of ACT/GNAT, so I will be
mostly in listening mode in the future about the subject. I still welcome
any company that wants to offer high quality Ada tools for small development
teams and hobby users on any platform!

Juha

P.S. I would like to thank people who have made the Mac port of GNAT. When I
say "Mac would be a risk" I don't mean I don't trust the work you have done,
I just prefer to pay for tools so I can say "fix this bug or I will not buy
from you again" :-)

P.S.II Paying for tools is not always necessary, there certainly are
situations where some deep pocket institution feels it's important to
provide free tools and they are even targeting users like me. (GCC C++ on
Linux & Mac, Java, ...)