From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,6b777a2e4fd60559,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Sloan.Kohler@gmail.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Only one Ada vendor? Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:05:06 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1192806306.892546.73350@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.175.225.24 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1192806316 14890 127.0.0.1 (19 Oct 2007 15:05:16 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:05:16 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=205.175.225.24; posting-account=ps2QrAMAAAA6_jCuRt2JEIpn5Otqf_w0 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:2502 Date: 2007-10-19T08:05:06-07:00 List-Id: 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