Re: Standard Library Interest?

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

Well, there's nothing wrong with someone wanting an Ada website or an 
Ada repository of freebie code and maintaining this as a hobby. It 
certainly doesn't hurt anything. But that's all it will ever be - a hobby.

If the *objective* is to create some sort of Ada library that will gain 
some official standing and become the de facto "Standard" Ada Library, 
then it will be just one more piece of evidence against using that 
approach. There have been people collecting up random bits of freebie 
code and making them available in libraries all the way back to Ada83. 
None of them have been adopted as the Conventional Ada Library. None of 
them have gained any consensus as to being "The Place To Go" to find 
common components. Any new attempts may not be a totally wasted effort, 
but they are about as likely to achieve the objective as all the rest of 
the attempts were.

There's nothing wrong with freebie software or giving it away under the 
GPL and so on - depending on the objectives one has. Its just that when 
one is discussing a large project, the formula works most often only in 
certain circumstances: Someone builds a product that they need within 
their company and because it isn't part of the "Core Business", they 
decide to give it away hoping to gain benefits of sharing the product. 
Someone builds a big product as part of their PhD work and gives it away 
hoping it gains usefullness after the academic purpose was served. 
Someone builds a product in a business that they hope to market and they 
give it away in order to build a customer base for the related services.

In each of the above examples, the software is a *byproduct* of some 
other intention or effort and, generally speaking, the people building 
it were *paid* to build it. You just don't see very many successful 
efforts to construct really large software products being done entirely 
by volunteers with the goal of giving it all away for the benefit of 
others. People have jobs and families and other responsibilities that 
keep them from devoting a thousand man-hours per year to an 
all-volunteer effort at which they will at best receive the undying 
gratitude of those they have benefited. Large software products don't 
get built for the fame and glory of it, nor is it a particularly good 
way to impress girls. :-)

That's why I've been insisting that for a library of any significance to 
succeed, its going to need some kind of backing from the Powers That Be. 
Another all-volunteer "Lets Do It For The Good Of Ada" effort isn't 
going to go anywhere - at least not without *some* kind of support &/or 
acceptance from the vendors.

MDC

Marius Amado Alves wrote:
> 
> This thread is going in circles! Has it not been established already
> that this kind of effort would be "just another Ada website"? First
> there was adahome (?), then adapower, now adaworld. These sites were
> born and died in succession. Is there something essentially new about
> adaworld that will make it avert the same fate?
> 
> No. For the 30th time (?), Listen to Marin and myself, for what this
> "something" might be: *commitment from Ada BIG players.*
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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     "So if I understand 'The Matrix Reloaded' correctly, the Matrix is
     basically a Microsoft operating system - it runs for a while and
     then crashes and reboots. By design, no less. Neo is just a
     memory leak that's too hard to fix, so they left him in... The
     users don't complain because they're packed in slush and kept
     sedated"

         --  Marin D. Condic
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