From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 10.236.66.235 with SMTP id h71mr4983047yhd.42.1422013799933; Fri, 23 Jan 2015 03:49:59 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by 10.182.33.38 with SMTP id o6mr52705obi.16.1422013799549; Fri, 23 Jan 2015 03:49:59 -0800 (PST) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!peer03.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!bm13no2462804qab.0!news-out.google.com!db6ni4746igc.0!nntp.google.com!hl2no1385024igb.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 03:49:59 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <0Kgqw.953330$_k.685364@fx16.iad> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=173.18.241.25; posting-account=HQu3XwoAAACgXAZiVLlGuYCkuhxw8i0w NNTP-Posting-Host: 173.18.241.25 References: <0Kgqw.953330$_k.685364@fx16.iad> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: What is the best license to use for open source software? From: jeditekunum@gmail.com Injection-Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 11:49:59 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Received-Bytes: 4231 X-Received-Body-CRC: 2389405463 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:24719 Date: 2015-01-23T03:49:59-08:00 List-Id: Interesting conversation about licenses and advocacy. But I have to say th= at 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 availab= ility of toolchains for the platforms of interest to me. It seems to me th= at is the biggest problem Ada has - without solving that there is no hope f= or increased popularity. My most recent increase in interest started only a few months ago. My plat= forms 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 repos= itory. 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 fo= r two boards. AVR-Ada requires building from source. Certainly all these contributions are appreciated however the sum total fal= ls short of giving the comforting feeling that investing in learning and us= ing 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 th= e point where I could drop recent non-".0" source onto OSX and Solaris and = have it built relatively painlessly. Once again very disappointed. Grante= d 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 pa= ckage with build script to create a gcc that can target a variety of ARM pr= ocessors (maintained by ARM themselves I believe). Minor tweaking got it t= o 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 toolchai= ns for my platforms. Which I will have to repeat all over again at some po= int 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 gettin= g 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/t= pci/index.html Despite having worked with C++ a moderate amount I still spend most of my t= ime using C. Because its stable and ubiquitous. Those key elements seem t= o drive most things in computing, not just programming languages. Sadly th= e end result seems to be that software remains mediocre, fails to evolve, a= nd has become severely devalued.