Re: Language support companies (Was: Java GOOD -- Fire BAD)

["Perry E. Metzger" <address@hidden>]

Laurent GUERBY <guerby@acm.org> writes:
> Talking about this, one thing I would need to feel
> more secure is paying multi-platform quality support : I mean you ship
> a report and you get back either a working compiler
> or a usable workaround in under a few days on all your platforms
> (contractual). When the project I currently work on, we choosed Ada 95
> as language (eh eh :) and GNAT as support provider (www.gnat.com) on our
> platforms (IRIX/MIPS, Solaris/SPARC, Linux/IA32, Win32/IA32,
> AIX/PowerPC).

I've run a free software company that I founded (Wasabi Systems, which
I left last year). Let me note that getting lots of small customers to
fund support of free compilers and such is a very hard job. Cygnus
used to get most of their gcc toolchain support contracts from systems
and processor vendors, not small individual companies.

Because of this, I suspect this might be a hard thing to get, simply
because it turns out very few smallish end customers actually want to
pay for support of such things...

Perry