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From: Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: AdaCore ... the Next SCO?
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:18:41 +0200
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Date: 2006-07-18T12:18:41+02:00
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Hyman Rosen wrote:

> It is, for the users of the software. You are forgetting, as
> programmers so often do, that the freedom granted by the GPL is not
> for the benefit of programmers.

Exactly!

But it is not surprising that we in a _programming_ newsgroup are a
bit annoyed, when our freedom is limited in favour of the freedom of
the users.

> If, in the process of granting users the freedom to run, read,
> modify, and share software it happens that programmers are
> inconvenienced, the FSF does not care. If users wind up with less
> software as a result, that is unfortunate, but not so unfortunate as
> to require overriding the principles of users' software freedom.

I understand the principle and idea in this, but I strongly suspect
that ACT are doing both themselves and Ada a disservice by abandoning
GMGPL.

It is not all costumers who can be convinced that they have to accept
_two_ new unknowns at the same time (GNU GPL and Ada), so we may end
up in a situation where Ada gets completely locked to its current
commercial niche.

I have looked a bit at alternatives to GtkAda and GNAT, but I can't
find anything which supports the platforms I need at a price within
the budgets of my typical commercial projects.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
�I like it when the support group complains that they have
 insufficient data on mean time to repair bugs in Ada
 software.�                              -- Robert I. Eachus