[Info-vax] Ada on VMS, was: Re: Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Paul Sture]

On 2018-05-12, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> Anybody here fancy volunteering a couple of years' effort to write an
> Ada compiler for free for these folks?   Nah?  Okay. Didn't think so. 
>  And for those that might be interested in offering this or another
> compiler commercially, they'll all be pondering whether the various
> potential customers are likely to pay enough to sustain the work and
> offset the development costs and preferably with a profit, or are the
> potential customers more likely to do little or nothing, or to port to
> some to other platform that has an existing Ada compiler?

>From a comment to one of The Register's articles, last July:

<https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/06/28/elementaryos_ubuntu_unity_replacement/#c_3219968>

    "Well as the author of a very popular open source file system I
    fully concur with that attitude. People and companies just won't pay
    and will bend over backwards not to pay,

    I have not received anything for the open source I wrote for the
    last 8 years. Nothing unless you count possibly 3 or 4 donations of
    less than $25 in 8 years.

    This is for a file system you will almost definitely have in a
    product and/or use indirectly when you use internet services (as it
    is used as a container file system in cloud).

    That's millions of installations. Bitter? You bet. I stopped
    developing it in 2014.

    Only recently I got approached by a major silicon valley internet
    company (revenue in billions of dollars) who wanted some advice. As
    usual they expressed "astonishment" when I refused to give it for
    nothing.

    You're all freetards."

-- 
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.
The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no
longer exists.                                           –– Eric Hoffer