Re: Will tree-ssa be GCC 3.5?

[Robert Dewar <dewar at gnat dot com>]

Matt Fago wrote:

> Does such a company exist for the rest of gcc? 

Sure such companies exist. Ada Core Technologies provides support for
Ada (GNAT) [and we also support C for our Ada customers if they are 
doing mixed language programming]. We have hundreds of clients, 
including Boeing, NASA, Lockheed, Eurocontrol, Thales, Rockwell etc.
Code Sourcery is providing support for C++ (they can tell you more
about that.

> Is there some failure in
> gcc (other than technical support) that has not been addressed by the
> existing developers?

There are many issues, including immediate guaranteed support, 
guaranteed licensing conditions (in a formal contract, something that 
many large companies want, they do not want to simply download stuff).
Also along with this comes consulting, and special development work.

> While a third-party is certainly free to provide
> support for GCC, in general this desire sounds to me as if it runs
> counter to the concept of OSS. For better and worse.

First, the emphasis of GCC is Free Software, rather than OSS (I don't 
want to start that discussion here, it is off topic, but if you don't
know the difference, go follow the extensive discussions on this topic
in other forums).

Free Software is about providing freedom for users from restrictive 
licensing conditions. We find that our large customers very much 
appreciate this freedom (which avoids vendor support lockin, and 
guarantees the possibility of customization if it should be needed).

Large scale users (e.g. Boeing) are more and more willing to consider 
the possibility and advantages of using open source/Free Software 
solutions, but high level support is a definitely prerequisite.

And just in case it is not clear, I am president of Ada Core 
Technologies, so I have a definite interest in this topic. Certainly 
there are many legitimate situations where the use of freely downloaded 
unsupported software is quite appropriate (indeed we provide academic
editions of GNAT for this purpose).

It seems very odd to somehow think that the GPL is inconsistent with the 
commercial sale or support of software. I often say to people, we are 
just like Microsoft, we sell copyrighted licensed software with support. 
The difference is that our license is MUCH more favorable, and our 
support is considerably more responsive and extensive :-)

Sorry for this off-topic post (this has almost nothing to do with gcc 
development), but the post I am responding to was very odd indeed!

Robert Dewar