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Comment by Hasknewbie | Hacker News Reader

Ada is in practice almost completely maintained by one single (consulting) company, Adacore, who, except for the GNAT compiler, release all of their OSS contributions under GPLv3 "to limit your freedom [of use/reuse]" (it's mentioned explicitly on their Website).

They do NOT want an autonomous Ada community to pop up, they just want to attract programmers they can contract. Since they're basically the only noteworthy contributors for Ada, they're impossible to bypass, hence using Ada means submitting to Adacore's whims.

Ada is indeed a very well designed language, and with some recent language revisions, so have you ever wondered why it did not get any traction at all? Well, that's why.

Every 6 months or so on HN or Reddit, someone rediscovers Ada, gets psyched and tells everyone ... and then discovers the licensing / controlled ecosystem issues, and walks away. And we don't hear about it. For about 6 months.

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> They do NOT want an autonomous Ada community to pop up, they just want to attract programmers they can contract. Since they're basically the only noteworthy contributors for Ada, they're impossible to bypass, hence using Ada means submitting to Adacore's whims.

Disclaimer: I work at AdaCore. Both forces are working in tension in the company: Some people push for the community, some for commercial interests. Of course as a company we want both to coexist, which is the difficult balance to find. The community advocates are getting stronger and trying to push their visions and make it understood. This is a long process but it's making headway. But, anyway, saying that we don't want an autonomous Ada community to pop up is dead wrong.

The libraries we release on GitHub are generally under GPLv3+runtime exception, so you can actually dynamically link against them in code with a different licence. https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatcoll-core for example.

It is very possible, if not ideal, to develop native software in Ada today, with whatever licence you choose.

Adacore is not the only compiler vendor in town.

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/objectada

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

Ada it is pretty live in European universities, a constant presence at FOSDEM during the last decades, and high integrity computing conferences.

Also, if you want the industry to care about any C or C++ feature, you have to buy your seat at the ANSI/ISO table.

You are correct, but I was speaking in terms of general-purpose programming, with an OSS/free implementation available, and to my knowledge all the other vendors only target the embedded and high-integrity spaces. And they cost money.

Moreover Adacore is the only one to have a general-purpose OSS (albeit kind of captive) ecosystem.

Your ANSI/ISO remark is off-topic. You don't need a seat there to use the extensive C++ ecosystem. With Adacore it's either GPLv3 all the way or you pay up. Also, to underline their gatekeeper status even more: they could one day decide to stop releasing their compiler to GNAT, without giving any reason, and there's nothing anyone could do about it.

> You don't need a seat there to use the extensive C++ ecosystem.

Thanks to GCC and Sun, and later Apple.

GCC was a toy compiler until Sun decided to start charging for their UNIX development SDK, which made many companies contribute to GCC's development.

Likewise if it wasn't for GPLv3, Apple would probably never bothered to create clang.

> With Adacore it's either GPLv3 all the way or you pay up

Actually I do have issues with people earning money with the work from others for free without contributing anything back.

GPLv3 is quite appealing for free software.

Want to earn money without contributing anything back? Use commercial licensed software.

> Also, to underline their gatekeeper status even more: they could one day decide to stop releasing their compiler to GNAT, without giving any reason, and there's nothing anyone could do about it.

There is always the very latest GPLv3 version, that everyone willing to contribute can carry on using.

> Actually I do have issues with people earning money with the work from others for free without contributing anything back.

With the BSD license, you can fork it all you want, but you have to maintain that fork. For most people/companies the feature is not a competitive advantage. So they donate the code back, and it means they don't have to spend so much time maintaining a fork.

The way I see it is, I'm a working stiff that's used a lot of opensource in the past. I don't mind releasing things as BSD clause to help another working stiff, as long as it doesn't contain my company's "secret sauce."

> Ada is in practice almost completely maintained by one single (consulting) company, Adacore

One would think this is a reason not to inform people of the existence of Ada – but I actually see it the other way around.

With a large enough community, the influence of Adacore would diminish and we would see more independent contributions. Ada has all the right things in place to create a great FOSS community, with an open, published standard, democratic contribution model, GNU support and so on. It's just missing the people to make it truly free.

The problem is that said GNU support (which AFAIK is the one everyone interested in the language uses) is contributed by ... Adacore. They can decide to stop doing that should they wish to do so. I might be out of date, but their Ada compiler is the only one that's up-to-date, targets multiple platforms, and can be used for free. So they have a sort of de facto vendor lock-in.

Also, if you have to recreate a collection of lib from scratch, I have the feeling people would rather contribute to a newer language in the same (or same-ish) space doing just that, such as Rust -- which I think is what is happening, even if Ada still has some distinctive features.

The GNAT compiler suffices for general programming in Ada though, so I'm not sure I understand your objection.

Also, Adacore is not the reason Ada didn't catch on. There were a lot of limitations in the standard library as of Ada95, because Ada focused so much on the embedded space. Because of this, some things that were easy in C/C++ were unnecessarily difficult in Ada.

Frankly, I think Rust achieves better ergonomics without Ada's verbosity, but Ada still has some great features that I wish were in other languages, like ranges.

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