Re: Software Economics

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1030147922.26232.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>...

> There is no economic difference between the devastating effect on
> competition of a zero priced browser and a zero priced Ada compiler.

There is a no comparison between these situations. In one case, a
company is
making its product available at no cost to drive out a competitor by
subsidizing the effort with other products (Internet Explorer). In the
case of ACT, we absolutely definitely do NOT make our product (which
is a
fully supported Ada compiler, with guaranteed licensing suitable to
the
application area) available at no cost. In fact many of the threads on
CLA (including fulminations by Leif) complain that GNAT Pro is too
expensive!

> the second was done because of government support and ideology

That is complete nonsense, you simply do not know what you are talking
about.
Bob Leif is making wild guesses and wild statements without the
slightest awareness of what is going on.

The reason that we make versions of GNAT freely available has nothing
to do
with government support (which disappeared 7 years ago) or with
ideology.
The reason we do this is because we think it is the best strategy for
the
continued health of Ada, and thus for the continued success of Ada
Core
Technologies. So it's simply good business sense!

When Ada first came out, there certainly was no freely available
version of
Ada, and several companies tried to market low cost products. They all
failed.
So that's a data point that seems completely contradictory to your
thesis.

Second observation. There has always been a high quality free compiler
for C,
and these days for C++ as well. Do you think this has "devasated the
market
for these compiler technologies?" Of course not, to claim this would
be absurd.

The reason that we think it is critical to have a freely available
high quality
Ada compiler around is that it sparks interest in students, hobbyists,
and individual engineers who want to experiment. If no one knows about
Ada, then
who is going to buy *any* Ada technology? - answer no one. 

Yes, occasionally companies may use the public version of GNAT for
mission critical projects. We find that a dubious decision, since the
use of unsupported software with no assurance of correct licensing is
rather risky.
Few companies are willing to take this risk in practice. We don't see
that
as having a significant impact on the commercial market for Ada.

Robert Leif is frustrated that no one will sell him an inexpensive
supported
Ada compiler, and wants to blame the availability of the free version
of
GNAT, but he really has nothing to support his claim here, and all the
evidence
points in the opposite direction.

My own analysis: Inexpensive mass market products are possible only if
there
is a mass market. I don't think there is such a market for Ada tools
in the
current climate. No one has ever succeeded with this approach yet, and
I would
not expect them to have succeeded. 

The scale of things is just not right.

If you charge $1000 for a product, then you need to sell several
thousand
of them a year to support a reasonable development effort, but that's
still
far to expensive for many hobbyists. Now if you reduce the price to
$50, you
have to sell ten's or hundred's of thousands of copies a year, and I
just don't think the market begins to be there.

Furthermore, if you do try to use the mass market model, then you
simply can't
provide any kind of reasonable support, and our experience is that
serious
Ada projects really appreciate and need (and can afford) good support.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

P.S. Yes, I know, I said I would not answer any more messages in this
thread,
but Bob Leif has a funny newsreader that keeps starting new threads
for no
obvious reason, so the threads won't stay killed :-)