Re: Development process in the Ada community

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> tmoran@acm.org wrote in message news:<zPlu8.90$2a2.158913722@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>...
> >   As Randy Brukardt noted the other day, the original idea for Claw "was to
> > create a de facto standard, make a subset freely available, and eventually
> > put the binding into the public domain to be a standard."  But it didn't
> > happen.  Recently someone complained that Claw didn't currently support
> > several features he needs.  Nobody, to my knowledge, has added support for
> > X to Claw, but multiple people have created alternative Windows bindings,
> > none of which has become a standard, and none of which supports the
>
> I would submit that this is because the "release it to the public
> domain" step was never followed through on. If they had done that
> first, instead of planning on doing it last, things might have been
> different.

And who was going to pay Randy and RR Software for their effort in
developing CLAW?    It is all well and good to want free software,
but someone, somewhere needs to pay for it.    One reason we don't
see more bindings to more environments for Ada is the widespread
reluctance of people to commit resources when there is no financial
benefit.   Even GNAT will disappear if ACT discovers there is
no financial reward in supporting it.

Tom Moran is right when he complains that so many have spent so
much energy creating partial implementations that discourage the
use of CLAW instead of getting on board and adding to its already
powerful set of capabilities.   I suspect Randy would not turn down
any offer of help in developing additional packages to extend the
CLAW software.

Richard Riehle