Free Software, Free Speech, Free Beer

Or, why buy PowerAda when you can get an Ada compiler for free…

By Oliver E. Cole

During my 25 years in this business, I've often been asked variations of the same question: "Why should I buy PowerAda when I can get a free compiler on the web and pay someone for support?"

I'll start with the short answer: Sometimes free is not free. Think about those free trial product-offers and free 30-day subscriptions. Down the road, there's often a price to pay, and if you're not careful that price is a hefty one.

It comes down to "free" being a word with multiple meanings. There's "free speech," for example, where free means speaking your thoughts without restriction. Then there's "free beer." Everyone gets that one.

In our industry, those "free" compilers you can download and use without restriction may prove quite costly. Let's say you decide to download a free compiler to save $10,000 (from your $2 million project). As with all software, there will be bugs, and someone has to fix them. There are companies you can hire for the job or your own programmers can address the problems. Either way, you could be looking at schedule slips and putting your entire project on hold for the learning curve and resolution. So, how much have you really saved?

With PowerAda, you'll pay an upfront purchase price. But when you do, you've aligned yourself with OC Systems, a development and support partner dedicated to your success.

We thoroughly benchmark each new release of PowerAda to ensure that it is faster than all other Ada compilers (and it always is). Plus, we pride ourselves on our commitment to customer care. Our support specialists are highly trained to answer your questions and turn around your projects ASAP to return you to full productivity…and they have years of experience in doing so.

Why should you partner with OC Systems and not download the freebie? Think about whether you're looking for an industry partner committed to full support or if you are ready to be on your own. It's clearly your choice but I hope these words, from someone who's watched the Open Source industry grow from its inception, will help you make an informed decision.

Oliver E. Cole is the president of OC Systems, Inc., a software company that develops, sells and supports advanced software instrumentation tools. He has over twenty-five years of extensive, hands-on experience in developing, testing and performance tuning large-scale mission-critical software for a variety of organizations, including commercial and international interests. Before founding OC Systems, he worked on a number of high reliability real-time systems for the U.S. military. Oliver Cole is actively involved in the Eclipse open source community. He is the lead of the Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) project, and has been appointed to the Eclipse Architecture Council, which is responsible for the long-term technical health of the Eclipse platforms and frameworks. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and has had a number of articles published in industry publications, including Dr. Dobb's Journal. Oliver Cole can be reached at +1 703-279-2760 or at .