Re: GWindows and a future home for it

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt> wrote:
 
: The problem is that open source licensing is unadjusted to what you 
: really want (which is usually

Care to elaborate? How do you measure "usually"?

: to charge for certain uses of the 
: software) or to a fair rewarding of the authors.

Could it be that you have a problem selling _your_ software, imagining?
an open source license ? Fear of giving away your produce and getting
nothing back? Your choice, there is no universal law that requires all
software to be Free Software.

Obviously empirical facts do show that there are both closed source
and open source licensing schemes, as well as mixed schemes. The
president of AdaCore has said, on c.l.ada, that you, Marius, could
pick GNAT and build a business around it. How do you _define_
business?

1  "protect your secrets and sell a license to use",
2  "show what you've got, in source, but not publicly, and charge money"
3  "make both sources and binaries freely available and charge for support."
4  "make binaries freely availably and influence people to
    become dependent on more expensive binaries later (MS technique)"
...

If you can't live with 3 then this is your choice. No need to resort
to pink hearts. (Obviously others differ successfully.)
For serious use of most software products other than consumer
products for those kids who have been brought up with software "sharing",
you are well advised to buy support anyway, no? So what empirical facts
can you show that there is no way to build a business around 
the mentioned licensing models, including GPLed software?

As for a request not to give newer compilers away, unstable
wave front products so to speak, who wants them?
Fans who must have the latest and greatest? And, please,
real data if you have.

Many recent additions to GNAT are available in
GCC, the GPS snapshot binaries have recent source code in them,
the latest Ada enabled GDB is available from the libre site,
so what's your point?

-- Georg