Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 7:44:04 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2018-04-17, Mehdi Saada wrote:
> > I have trouble believing that Adacore (free) forbid completely selling
> > softwares in other licenses as GPL or the likes of. I have no technical
> > knowledge of these things, but I feel like  your points of view are a
> > bit... one sided ?
> 
> Adacore force the GPL on any software developed using the Community
> version. See
> 
> https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison
> 
> where it says (under Community) "For open source GPL software".
> 
> Oh, and it's not "one sided", it's called giving the Ada community
> a dose of cold reality. You can talk about the advantages of Ada all
> you want but Ada's advantages mean nothing until the Ada compiler
> situation matches the compiler situation for other languages.
> 
> Any compiler which imposes the GPL on any software developed using
> it would be absolutely dead on arrival in many environments especially
> when compilers for other languages are available for free which do
> not impose such constraints.
> 
> GPL based software development is a small subset of all the software
> development out there.
> 
> Also, as far as I can see (and I am willing to be corrected here if
> I am wrong) it means that you can't even write a library in Ada under
> something other than the GPL if you are going to use the Community
> version. As soon as you compile the library source with the Community
> version, it falls under the GPL and hence any software using your
> library also falls under the GPL.
> 
> In order to create an Ada library with a LGPL or MIT licence
> (for example), you have to fall back to the FSF version which
> does not have that constraint.

Survey:  truly how bad is using FSF GNAT in practice?  It of course lacks all the extras and older language editions (e.g., ASIS, Ada1983, Ada1995, Ada2005, AJIS).  And sure, FSF GNAT lags by up to 24 months compared to GNAT Pro Enterprise/Assurance level; feature-by-feature bugfix-by-bugfix FSF GNAT lags by less than 12 months when compared to GNAT GPL Community Edition.

I think that the real problem with AdaCore is the lack of sub-$1000 non-GPL annual license for mass-market operating systems on mass-market ISAs, such as Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.  Looking at some other compiler vendors of non-Ada languages, each of them have a sub-$1000 non-GPL license available:  RemObjects $800/year (all target mass-market OSes/ISAs included), Microsoft $500/year (all mass-market target OSes/ISAs included), Intel $700/year/OS.

I am always baffled by why AdaCore doesn't hire an engineer for GNAT on mass-market OSes on mass-market ISAs (or even one engineer per each mass-market OS), because only 150 to 200 $1000 annual licenses would more than fully cover all costs for that engineer.  The likelihood of an even greater quantity of such mass-market annual licenses would be quite high, which implies profit instead of break-even.  Likewise for other Ada compiler vendors.