Re: Development process in the Ada community

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message news:<3CC10367.4000904@telepath.com>...
> Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> > Well, I have a philosophical objection to the GPL (or, more accurately,
> > Open Source). I believe programmers have an ethical obligation to stand
> > behind their programming. There are exceptions, of course (if the

The GPL has very little to do with Open Source. I would say the above
indicates that Randy does not understand the term. The GPL is merely a
software license that gives users of your software more rights than
most
typical licenses. If you say you are philosophically opposed to the
GPL,
you are simply saying that you are happy only with restrictive
licenses
that give your users few rights. Hard to see how you could be
philosophically
in favor of restricting rights in this way, easy enough to see how you
could
be commercially in favor of such restrictions. And indeed it is clear
enough
that Randy's objections to open source should be taken with a grain of
salt,
considering that, like Microsoft, he is in the proprietary software
business
and finding himself in competition with GPL'ed software :-)

> Ahhhh. I think I understand. As someone who has multiple publicly 
> available projects out there, I certianly know the feeling of moral 
> obligation when someone asks for help with a problem in *your* code. 

> With me, occasionally someone will just be so lost that it would take 
> forever to help them out, and I have other commitments (a job, a house 
> and yard, a wife and 2 kids) that preclude me from spending the time to 
> give them the help they need. Its always painful when I have to tell 
> someone I can't help them any further.

And it is *less* painful not to give them anything in the first
place???
Sort of like meeting a beggar on the street and deciding to give
nothing,
because otherwise you will feel a moral obligation to provide food,
clothing,
and housing :-)
 
> I think no matter how you go, at some point you do have to draw a line. 
> ACT seems to do it by prioritizing bug fixes in favor of paying customers 

It is not a matter of prioritizing, ALL our work is aimed at providing
services
to our customers. You need to get used, as you would with any other
company,
of assuming that everything we do is aimed at satisfying our existing
customers
and getting more customers. 

> by being a bit anal about submitted bug reports being in the proper form 
> from unsupported users

That's because we find it is only worth while for us to pay attention
to well
submitted reports. We pay attention to such reports not to help those
who submit them, to whom we have no obligations at all, but because if
the reports
are clear and cleanly submitted, then it may be helpful to our
customers to
fix problems found in this way.

Most useful reports from ACT come from a small group of people to whom
we
have give "external tester" status (those of you reading this know you
are).
These are people who have in the past submitted helpful reports in a 
constructive manner, and we give them a special pseudo-customer number
and
track their submissions. Again, we do this not because of any
obligation to
this group of people, but because they help us with our primary goal
of providing high quality products for our customers.

The majority of reports on the public version from outside this group
have
proved of relatively small value (there are exceptions, but few and
far
between). Mostly they are people asking questions that could for
instance
be answered by reading the manual. For our customers, we are more than
happy
to answer all questions, that's part of what they are paying for, but
we have
no time for non-customers unless they are helping us!

> and by giving supported customers first dibbs on 
> newly-developed code and bug fixes. It apparently works for them, but I 
> have at times thought I'd have trouble being as rutheless about it as 
> they seem to be.

How odd .. Ted Dennison is indeed one of the people who over the years
has
chafed at not being able to get free support, but I don't feel the
least bit
"ruthless" in not providing Ted any kind of support. We are like any
other
company, we have to provide services for our customers, we are not
some kind
of charitable organization that has been set up to keep non-customers
like
Ted happy :-)

> And let's not even get into the fact that asking 
> customers not to redistribute the fixes you give them to non-customers 
> is quite against the spirit of the GPL...

We have never said this to customers (Ted wouldn't know, he has never
been
a customer). Now of course this does not mean Boeing is going to take
the
time, effort (and incur the possible liability) of distributing
software to
Ted. The GPL is about giving Boeing all the freedom that Boeing needs
to make
full use of the software. That is relatively unlikely to include
sending
copies to Ted :-)

By the way, I find it highly amusing for Ted to be pontificating on
the GPL
like this. It is in fact perfectly within the spirit of the GPL to ask
(not
require) people not to distribute certain software at certain times.
For
example, the GNU project itself frowns on people taking untested
snapshots
and making them into widely distributed products. It's just not
helpful to
the GNU project to have this kind of half baked software wandering
around.
Richard Stallman certainly would not agree with Ted's assessment of
the
"spirit of the GPL" here. The spirit of the GPL is about allowing
effective
sharing of software. Sometimes, effective sharing involves NOT
prematurely
widely distributing things, and everyone understands this.

> Funny. I have that exact same problem with newspapers too. I tried 
> explaining this to my father-in-law (a retired English teacher and 
> regular newspaper reader) and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. :-)

Yes I can sympathize (with your father-in-law -- most odd indeeed) :-)