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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/12/2018 10:57 PM, Paul Sture wrote:
> 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."

Hmmmm.

He chose to release some code as open source.

Very few people chose to donate money to him.

He chose not to offer support for free.

He chose to stop working on the open source code.

I am not sure that I see the problem.

He made his choices.

Was he mislead in any way?

Arne