Re: AJPO is still clueless about the reality of DoD Ada rejection

[pp000166@interramp.com (Robert Munck)]

On Fri, 15 Mar 1996 21:06:34 GMT, srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
Aharonian) wrote:

> ... (like that COTS is compatible with the Ada Mandate - what a lie)

I'm beginning to see indications that the DoD fad for COTS software
is fading, and I'll go out on a limb to predict that there will be an
anti-COTS backlash by DoD within five years. Reason: COTS software
may well require more maintenance than home-grown.  See, those
greedy commercial folk find themselves competing with each 
other in saturated markets with diminishing original sales of
their packages. The solution is to churn out new releases as
often as possible with plenty of spiffy new features that
unfortunately tend to change the behavior of the old ones.
Likewise the platform suppliers are upgrading their OSs and
windowing systems, and even the hardware is changing enough
to make two-generation-old machines worthless.

So your nice DoD application, with two or three COTS packages
and running on MS Windows 3.0 on a 286, needs a HUGE and
CONTINUOUS upgrading and re-distribution activity.  If it were
all in good old stable Ada (ignoring the once-a-decade revisions),
the compiler vendor would handle it all by upgrading the run-time
and code generator.

So has anyone else seen this happening?

Bob Munck@acm.org