Re: Killing software and certification (was: Ada-Oriented GUI)

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 7:04:46 PM UTC-5, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Dan'l Miller" wrote in message 
> news:0e59a988-ed21-4e45-a2ed-7a51995dbe6c@googlegroups.com...
> ...
> > ... it is up to the consumer to read the label on a product to see whether
> > the product has been designed and manufactured in accordance with
> > various voluntary regimes of best-practices in industry-standards.
> 
> That's surely helpful for the lady that was run over crossing the street.
> 
> Self-driving cars have safety requirements near those of avionics software. 
> But the actual requirements on such software is far from the same. I'm 
> afraid it will take a bunch of lawsuits to get the automakers in line, and 
> quite possibly not even that. (I hear they actively want to avoid making 
> software that actually is known to work.)
> 
>                         Randy.

My point is that self-driving-automobile companies that, say, adopt DO-178B/C level of rigor (and implement in Ada with proper RTOS) will have vastly more de facto safe harbor in a lawsuit from either that lady's estate, the attorney general, or the FTC/NTSB.  Conversely, companies that cannot demonstrate adherence to regimes of rigor (or demonstrate adherence to a relatively worthless regime of rigor) are wide open to lawsuits incoming from multiple trajectories, precisely aimed at their deep pockets.

Randy, if you want to achieve your goal of Ada2020 saving lives in self-driving vehicles, then you (personally and as all of ARG in the plural) need to hitch your Ada2020 wagon to IATF 16949 or other automotive quality-management best-practices to bring DO-178B/C or equivalent requirements to the automotive industry.  Ada2020 can have the most perfect solution to provably-correct tasking, but if its adoption is neither required nor strongly motivated by a quality-management regime, then no one will even know of your achievement.

There exists an expedient backdoor to forcibly ramming Ada and DO-178B/C-esque requirements on the self-driving automotive industry (and/or the larger drive-by-wire automotive industry, e.g., the Toyota debacle).  That backdoor is the automotive property-casualty insurance industry.  If no insurer will affordably insure self-driven automobiles that lack, say, DO-178B/C compliance (and better yet the promised Ada2020 provable-correctness in tasking), then Ada will win the safety-critical-vehicles war and many of the major battles in that war.  Trusting that Ada2020's forthcoming awesome goodness will magically appear in automobiles by passive osmosis would be a recipe for being a coulda-woulda-shoulda footnote in the history books.  Statutory laws tend to follow whatever the automotive property-casualty insurance industry's lobbyists demand in Washington DC and in state legislatures.

(Here I am assuming that your Ada2020 goals come to fruition practically.  I hope that they do, even though I am skeptical.)