Re: Newcomers to

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org> writes:

> Ada does look good but, as far as I can tell, if I ever want to use it
> for any software not to be distributed under the GPL, I'm faced with
> dealing with a subscription model (with goodness knows what guarantees
> of ongoing affordability) negotiated with a private corporation, so
> personally I'll probably actually not invest any more time into
> learning about Ada and disappear from here and use something else for
> my projects.

If you were to negotiate with AdaCore, you'd find that you are entitled
to continue to use the version(s) you obtained while you were supported
indefinitely (even after the support contract expires).

If you are prepared to use the FSF GCC unsupported (except by the
goodwill of folk here, on Stack Overflow, and on IRC somewhere), and you
can get hold of a build with Ada enabled (Debian Linux (easy),
probably other Linux distributions, Mac OS X, ...) then you can
develop code and release binaries under any licence that you want:
see GCC Runtime Library Exception[1], Rationale document and Frequently
Asked Questions[2].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-faq.html