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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: GNAT GPL is not shareware
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 14:14:18 -0600
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:24422
Date: 2015-01-06T14:14:18-06:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"David Botton" <david@botton.com> wrote in message 
news:72ede803-e2e9-4e21-a415-457374bef87d@googlegroups.com...
>
>> Unfortunately, I fear that nobody from Atego is reading this
>> newsgroup... (Yes, they (Alsys at that time) used to have a "personal"
>> version of the compiler).
>
> It really wouldn't matter, there is no big profit in the small sales in 
> their minds.
>
> Most of these vendors have the same small minded thinking of only looking 
> at direct sales
>instead of expanding the user base through mass marketing efforts through 
>free or cheap
>compiler options.

That's not really fair. Both Atego (with ObjectAda) and RRS (with Janus/Ada) 
tried to market low-cost compilers for the mass market, but neither made 
money.

Our experience was that the more money and effort that we put into it, the 
more money that we lost (sales were about the same either way).

I've heard that the personal version of ObjectAda had essentially the same 
results -- Atego put a lot of money into it and didn't even break-even. (And 
it doesn't make sense to lose money on every unit one sells.)

There may be a model out there which works for a low-end Ada compiler, but I 
would expect that it would require low effort in order to be profitable. 
Which makes it problematical, as some sort of support is required (at a 
minimum, packaging and fixing of packaging, which can take an amazing amount 
of time).

                                                      Randy.