Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Juha Valimaki" <juha.valimaki@xdsloy.com> wrote in message news:<ak4vaj$5g6$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi>...

> I am sure their support is extremely
> good, but it's hard to imagine how I would alone get enough advice from them
> to justify the cost (especially if I need binaries for N platforms).

One interesting piece of experience here is that when we started we
used to
have prices for 1 or 2 seats. We abandoned that. Why? Because it was
eating
us alive. These tiny projects used far far more of our support
services than
larger projects. Some people complain that they have to pay the same
for
one developer as five, but in fact if we priced according to
historical
data, we should charge more for one person than five.

That's actually not so surprising, one person working on their own is
indeed
all on their own, and thus they need help wherever they can get it,
whereas
even a small team will be able to help one another over many simple
problems.

It just maybe that your imagination is not good enough, and that in
fact you
would find that a support contract would easily justify its cost. Many
of our
customers *are* very small developers, and find our support services
extremely
useful and very much worth the cost.

This is of course something you have to figure out for yourself. If
the GNAT Pro product is not for you, have a look at offerings from
other Ada vendors.
You may well be able to find less expensive products that will meet
your
particular needs. There is a lively competition in the Ada market. It
is not
at all the case that GNAT is the only game in town :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies