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From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: AdaCore's survey regarding the future of GNAT Community Edition
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 17:44:30 +0100
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foo wong <crap@spellingbeewinnars.org> writes:

> I have wrote several disparaging posts about Adacore and my take on
> the situation was:
>
>  - GNAT Pro: professional support, more targets.
>
>  - GNAT Community: Lower level of quality assurance, less targets, and
> a pure GPL license for the run-time for a demoware experience
>
>  - GNAT FSF: least quality assurance designed to push users to the
> community build or Pro ASAP
>
> I hope I was wrong all along and either way, the future just got a
> little brighter as Adacore's two offerings will now be suitable for
> free or non-free software.

IMO you've been wrong all along, at least so far as the quality is
concerned. Assurance, yes; number of targets, yes; support, yes.

> I don't believe that there is anything illegal about re-distributing
> GNAT Pro so if the gap in quality was so large between Pro and FSF, I
> think one paying customer might take pity on us eventually and release
> Pro to the world and reset the gap for a while.

I wouldn't have done this; but we were stuck on an old release for a
long time, so wouldn't have helped.

> With dark days setting in for the avionics industry(for a while at
> least), maybe Adacore will eventually reconsider and will release Pro
> as their FSF offering to broaden their user base.

The only difference between the pro compiler and FSF is a few months.