Re: What is the best license to use for open source software?

[jeditekunum@gmail.com]

Interesting conversation about licenses and advocacy.  But I have to say that I think the barriers are far deeper.

I've been interested in Ada for over 20 years.  Every time I decide to put more effort into learning it I quickly become frustrated due to the availability of toolchains for the platforms of interest to me.  It seems to me that is the biggest problem Ada has - without solving that there is no hope for increased popularity.

My most recent increase in interest started only a few months ago.  My platforms are:

1. OSX desktop
2. Solaris x86 server
3. AVR and ARM Cortex-M3/M4 embedded

First question is where to get recent toolchains.  On OSX neither macports or homebrew enable Ada in their gcc builds.  Same for Solaris package repository.

GNAT GPL has OSX but not Solaris.  Doesn't have AVR or ARM hosted on OSX.

gnuada has OSX; has Solaris but not recent; has OSX-hosted ARM Cortex-M4 for two boards.  AVR-Ada requires building from source.

Certainly all these contributions are appreciated however the sum total falls short of giving the comforting feeling that investing in learning and using Ada is wise.

Foolishly I expected that the state of GCC had improved since the last time I messed with building my own.  I thought things would have advanced to the point where I could drop recent non-".0" source onto OSX and Solaris and have it built relatively painlessly.  Once again very disappointed.  Granted most the problems are not specific to Ada.  And by problems I don't mean just finding the right incantation of configure options (of which there are many).  After many hours of struggling I got it built with Ada on both OSX and Solaris.

Next I tackled ARM.  gnu-arm-embedded over on launchpad.net has a source package with build script to create a gcc that can target a variety of ARM processors (maintained by ARM themselves I believe).  Minor tweaking got it to build on OSX with Ada but of course needs a rts from elsewhere.

At this point I'm exhausted.  If I get ARM working and if I get AVR working I will have spent an enormous amount of time just getting working toolchains for my platforms.  Which I will have to repeat all over again at some point in the future due to nothing other than platform progression.  I don't want to become a compiler developer.

This is the same kind of cycle I go through every time I think about getting serious about Ada.  I suspect the vast majority of people aren't going to bother getting this far.

Then I look at Ada here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Despite having worked with C++ a moderate amount I still spend most of my time using C.  Because its stable and ubiquitous.  Those key elements seem to drive most things in computing, not just programming languages.  Sadly the end result seems to be that software remains mediocre, fails to evolve, and has become severely devalued.