Re: Standard Library Interest?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Right. I can see that and anticipat that objection on the part of the 
vendors. But at the end of the day, you are not going to get something 
for nothing. We could jam a whole gigantic library into the standard and 
they'd have to support it or admit they don't have a "Full" Ada 
compiler. (I've already observed why we *don't* want it in the standard, 
but assume for a minute it was there in order to *force* the vendors 
into providing it.) They could each pay the cost of building that huge 
library and each pay the cost of supporting that library and each suffer 
individually.

***OR***

The vendors could work as a team on this and share the expense. Form up 
some sort of organization to take care of the library and support it. It 
comes from a single source and they could relatively easily point any 
customer support issues to that source. Its even conceivable that the 
organization they start could become self-sustaining - generating 
revenue out of their own support contracts or software sales or 
royalties or whatever else they might provide.

Here's the thing: Nobody is going to ge a Conventional Ada Library free. 
*Someone* is going to bear the cost of producing it and maintaining it. 
Even if that "Someone" is a bunch of volunteers. If you want to have 
reasonable control over the library and get it done on a schedule and 
have it meet various expectations, that's going to cost something. 
However, that doesn't mean the cost has to be huge or back-breaking for 
each vendor. Some sort of cooperative effort and creative licensing 
might enable it to get constructed and supported without having to incur 
huge costs.

MDC


Mark A. Biggar wrote:
> 
> 
> The other issue that the vendors will have is the support issue.  If
> they distribute it, then they will have to provide some level of support 
> for it, if only training their support people on how to say "distributed
> as is, we don't support it".  And vendor don't like to do that, as it
> causes "Good Will" problems with their customers.
> 
> So even if you have the best thing sense Turing machines, some vendors
> may not distribute it, because they don't see any benefit in the
> increase in support costs.
> 
> Anything that isn't in the standard can have this problem.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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