Re: Root of a GNAT problem (was: Gnat v3.05 bug or compilation problem

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Peter Herman said

"I simply asked for more transparency.
The process became too opaque for non-customers.
Robert's statements deserve agreement, no doubt.
But I can't identify and trace my item submitted, that's all.

In summary I made the same good experience like Norman H. Cohen wrote,
therefore I really can't complain. However I think,
that ACT does not have to do more work when preserving the
visibility of the bug report mechanism of the old days.
I even see an advantage: The low priority assignments for a non-customer
could drive him to a customer  ;-)"


Yes, I know what you are asking for, but despite your "think", it does in
practice take significant resources to "preserve the visibility of the
bug report mechanism of the old days" for non-paying customers. In the
old days, the DoD supported GNAT directly, and we did provide free
support, now it doesn't, and we don't!

We do continue to provide public releases of GNAT. Often people are under
the impression that somehow this is required by the GPL, but it is not.
The GPL does not require you to distribute anything, and does not require
you to distribute it free if you do (there is much confusion on this issue,
for example, the text at adahome contains some completely incorrect statements
on this issue).

However, we feel that it is sufficiently important for the Ada community
for GNAT to be easily available, that we do spend the necessary resources
to make these free releases, even though this work is not supported by
anyone. But we definitely do NOT have the time to exchange bug tracking
information with unsupported users.