Re: GNAT GPL is not shareware

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"David Botton" <david@botton.com> wrote in message 
news:a48c3f8f-dcee-4d66-aafb-8f3c13733b53@googlegroups.com...
>> Sadly, I don't think there is much future for doing things well, because 
>> for
>> that one can neither sell maintenance nor get much effort for 
>> improvement.
>> Which ultimately leads to a bleak future for humanity, IMHO.

>Not true building a vertical market on a libre base, offering other 
>services
>around the language and products, brokering consulting services, job
>placement services, training, etc. I can think of many other ways to 
>monitize
>your work on an open source compiler (I say work on because the compiler
>was and is not the product, that falsehood alone has blinded them to
>innovation so far).

I don't believe most of this. For one thing, AdaCore has lots of 
non-compiler products; they've clearly tried (and are trying) to provide 
many things other than the compiler.

Indeed, a compiler has *never* been a product. The product at the very least 
is an ecosystem of development tools. A compiler alone is not a very useful 
thing. And while the language is standardized, those other things are not. 
As such, vendor lock-in is almost inevitable -- changing IDEs, project 
management, debuggers, etc. is a lot more difficult than changing compilers.

But I contend that any business model based on software is ultimately 
doomed. Free Software has made it far too easy to copy any good ideas -- on 
top of which the later implementations can avoid mistakes made in the first. 
The pioneer, the visionary has no hope of making any money off their work --  
in order to make money, they have to do something totally unrelated ("job 
placement", what the heck does that have to do with anything?) and that 
takes way too much time away from the thing that would actually do good.

>The one guaranteed long term failure plan history has proven out many times
>is customer lock-in methods...  I don't predict doom for them, only because
>enough people care about Ada to try and prevent it, despite themselves.

I agree if you're only talking about lock-in alone. Customers get wise to 
that in a hurry. OTOH, GPS, gprbuild, etc. are also things that cause 
lock-in. But it would be hard to have a useful development system without 
something like those things. So to some extent, lock-in is pretty much 
built-into the territory.

                                                     Randy.