Only one Ada vendor?

[Sloan.Kohler@gmail.com]

Its Friday - thought I would try to stir things up...

Several people have stated that "Ada" refers to the latest approved
version (i.e., Ada => "Ada 2005").  Its been well over a year since
AdaCore announced Ada 2005 support started shipping a pretty complete
implementation.  As far as I know, no other vendor has yet announced
any intention to support the current standard.  Maybe they're working
on it in secrecy. Maybe they are waiting on customer demand.  Maybe
they have already lost most of their customers to AdaCore and simply
don't care anymore.

Whatever the case, I'm concerned that the number of viable Ada vendors
seems to be shrinking. The benefits of language standardization are
greatly diminished if only one vendor bothers to support the standard.

I have no relationship to AdaCore other than being a supported
customer who is very happy with their support and their business model
(i.e. they sell support, not license keys).  Their "build it and they
will come" approach to product development and attracting customers
seems to work well.

I'm aware that Aonix and DDC-I have had some recent Ada related
product announcements. That's a good thing but still no public
indication that they're working on Ada 2005 support. At least its
still possible to find Ada products featured on the Aonix, DDC-I, and
Green Hills web pages.

I'm upset/disappointed by what IBM has done to Apex since taking over
Rational several years ago. Apex was (& still is) an excellent, full
featured (though costly) Ada development environment.  Since IBM took
over it seems that Apex product development has completely stagnated
while they focus on collecting license maintenance fees from legacy
customers who are in too deep to switch compilers.  They also allowed
the same thing to happen with ClearCase - ClearCase users are
switching to Subversion for configuration management. Its not nearly
as capable as ClearCase but its good enough and can be deployed
without buying licenses.   If Apex and ClearCase were marketed with an
open-source, support focused business model (instead of a license fee
focused business model) I'm convinced they would have a lot more
success in the market.

So we need to have more than one Ada vendor to keep Ada viable but I
don't have hope that anyone else can effectively compete with AdaCore
unless they adopt a similar business model.

-- Sloan