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* AdaCore's survey regarding the future of GNAT Community Edition
@ 2020-07-24 21:42 Wesley Pan
  2020-07-25  2:17 ` Stephen Leake
                   ` (4 more replies)
  0 siblings, 5 replies; 41+ messages in thread
From: Wesley Pan @ 2020-07-24 21:42 UTC (permalink / raw)


I just discovered this via Ada Planet...

Link to the Google Docs survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSet9x3UNUFmfWt5v-8Jb7dW8BgKiJxyEMJ_TFm0G2UJKx5OmQ/viewform
 
Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/ada/comments/hwgbwa/survey_on_the_future_of_gnat_community/


Survey summary reproduced below...


GNAT Ecosystem Community Survey

Hello Ada supporters,

We are writing this message here to present, discuss and get feedback on a plan that we at AdaCore want to put in place. Over the next couple of years, we want to experiment with an evolution of the GNAT ecosystem  and would like your help.

So far, there are three grand families of GNAT releases:

 - GNAT Pro: An AdaCore release with professional support and high level quality assurance. Available on many different targets (PowerPC, Leon, vxWorks, etc.).

 - GNAT Community: An AdaCore release with a lower level of quality assurance, less targets, and a pure GPL license for the run-time.

 - GNAT FSF: community built compiler from the FSF source tree. Available from Linux distributions or Msys2 on Windows, for instance.

Moving forward, we are looking to simplify the situation and remove GNAT Community from the picture.

The plan is to reach a point where AdaCore would not release GNAT Community compilers and instead instruct non-professional users to use GNAT FSF builds. We would still keep making GNAT Studio and SPARK releases, and libraries such as AWS and xmlada will be available in the Alire package manager (http://alire.ada.dev). With this plan we also want to invest some more time to help the maintainers of GNAT packages in Linux, BSD, or Windows (msys2) distributions, for instance, and potentially contribute when necessary. Our intention is to contribute to various communities building GNAT packages so that what can be done today with GNAT Community will be doable tomorrow from these community-led builds.

Why are we working on this plan?

We have noticed that GNAT Community's pure GPL license on the run-time is seen as a barrier to new Ada users. More specifically, understanding the consequences of the GPL licence is complex. The result is that newcomers will often be introduced to Ada/SPARK by a legal licence discussion rather than looking at the value of the technology. This will, understandably, scare people off. 

On top of this, we are witnessing a widespread misunderstanding around the openness of the Ada language and the GNAT compiler, some people seem to think that Ada and GNAT are proprietary technologies. We see this phenomenon as detrimental to the growth of the Ada community. Of course this misunderstanding will not fade in a couple days, but we think that removing GNAT Community will make the situation clearer and will allow us to better communicate on the situation of the Ada compiler ecosystem.

Besides general comments and discussion around this plan, we would appreciate your feedback in this survey form. Please help us spread the word. The more feedback we get, the more we will be able to move in the right direction.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 41+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-09-01 18:59 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 41+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-07-24 21:42 AdaCore's survey regarding the future of GNAT Community Edition Wesley Pan
2020-07-25  2:17 ` Stephen Leake
2020-07-25 10:35   ` Stéphane Rivière
2020-07-27  8:36   ` Fabien Chouteau
2020-07-25 10:35 ` Stéphane Rivière
2020-07-27  8:07 ` DrPi
2020-07-27  8:38   ` Fabien Chouteau
2020-07-28 13:06     ` DrPi
2020-07-28 14:38   ` Shark8
2020-07-28 16:27     ` Simon Wright
2020-07-28 21:34       ` Shark8
2020-07-29  9:44         ` foo wong
2020-07-29 16:44           ` Simon Wright
2020-07-29 20:59             ` foo wong
2020-08-01  5:32 ` ldries46
2020-08-02 23:43   ` Stephen Leake
2020-08-15 16:38 ` Kevin K
2020-08-16  2:24   ` Roger Mc
2020-08-16 10:08     ` Simon Wright
2020-08-16 12:08       ` Stephen Leake
2020-08-16 12:54       ` Roger Mc
2020-08-19 14:29     ` Simon Wright
2020-08-19 18:09       ` Andreas ZEURCHER
2020-08-19 19:11         ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2020-08-19 20:21           ` Luke A. Guest
2020-08-20  5:48           ` Roger Mc
2020-08-20  6:43             ` Stéphane Rivière
2020-08-31 14:54               ` Vincent DIEMUNSCH
2020-09-01 18:22                 ` Stephen Leake
2020-09-01 18:59                   ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2020-08-19 20:17         ` Simon Wright
2020-08-19 20:19         ` Luke A. Guest
2020-08-19 20:50           ` Simon Wright
2020-08-19 21:35             ` Luke A. Guest
2020-08-20  5:53               ` Roger Mc
2020-08-20  6:12                 ` st...@cunningsystems.com
2020-08-20  9:04               ` Simon Wright
2020-08-20  5:42       ` Roger Mc
2020-08-20  6:01         ` Roger Mc
2020-08-16  2:42   ` Luke A. Guest
2020-08-17  8:51     ` Stéphane Rivière

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