After all, FSF GNAT was already compatible with Ada 2012 at that time. And a company that makes large investments in software using Ada undoubtedly needs support and will not shy away from the comparatively low additional costs for licenses and maintenance contracts in its own interest. But it is important that the technology is absolutely free for small companies and people who are simply interested in the technology.
This sucked for Smalltalk, and it sucks for Ada. I stand by my statement there was no equivalent to the Turbo family for Ada. The Ada space isn't very different than the Smalltalk although I think the Ada story might be worse. Damn shame for such a nice programming language.
1) https://www.adacore.com/community >> https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison
That's very academic. The GPS is available under GPL (see https://github.com/AdaCore/gps). As long as you don't deploy GPS or link your app with it you can use it for closed-source apps as you like; it's definitely no GPL violation.
> This sucked for Smalltalk
Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk; but for the latter you can use Squeak for free (under MIT or Apache license) since the nineties and today even a couple of other powerful Smalltalk implementations such as Pharo.
No, if small commercial developers cannot use the language without paying massive fees, you might as well forget any popularity. Heck, you couldn't even use Ada for non-GPL open source programs.
Not sure why you compare it to Smalltalk
Because Smalltalk vendors have a long history of doing the same pricing that made it impractical to impossible for the little guy to use the language. There have been several threads on HN about this.
Have you read my answer? There is no reason why you couldn't use FSF GNAT or GPS in closed-source projects.
> Heck, you couldn't even use Ada for non-GPL open source programs.
Why not? The GPL GNAT with RLE allows you to use any licence with your application, whether closed or open-source.
> Because Smalltalk vendors have a long history of doing the same pricing that made it impractical to impossible for the little guy to use the language.
There were always free ST versions as far as I can remember. The "little guy" could e.g. use "Little Smalltalk" by Budd which appeared before 1987.
No one could write a commercial program with Little Smalltalk. Love the book, but the implementation is not going to work. Heck, Squeak could not do a program that looked anything like a real Windows or Mac program.
Maybe we're talking past each other but the IDE says the community edition is only authorized for GPL software, every other edition is big bucks. https://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/comparison
> Maybe we're talking past each other but the IDE says the community edition is only authorized for GPL software, every other edition is big bucks.
Do not let this mislead you. The software is available under GPL. That is all you need to know. And GPL allows you to use the software for any purpose. Maybe I should mention that I studied law for two years and then had one more year of lectures in patent and license contract law (see my profile for more information).
But there is Fear Uncertainty & Doubt.
https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=...
https://www.cbronline.com/news/digitalk_has_first_compiled_v...
Digital's Smalltalk/V Macintosh will continue to cost $199.95, but eliminates the previous per copy run-time royalty fee."
https://books.google.com/books?id=jVAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA16&dq=d...
Did Turbo ever have it's enterprisey moment?
Are you talking about the Eighties? GNAT is available for free since the nineties and the GPS IDE is available for free on all relevant platforms since nearly twenty years; even before there were IDE like alternatives for free.