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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,35ce1c7836290812 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long)) Date: 1999/03/09 Message-ID: <7c2c11$ila$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> X-Deja-AN: 452852219 References: <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com> <7bhlb2$h4n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com> <7bkasm$rlt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com> <7bmbr5$j3p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com> <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bp6pv$2mm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bpjoe$eia$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36E25778.C056829@chocolatesaltyballs.com> <7bu97u$49l$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36E43789.12AAED5C@chocolatesaltyballs.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x10.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Mar 09 05:36:33 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-03-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Incidentally a bit of history may provide useful perspective here. I know that many readers are fully familiar with this, but we always have new readers who have discovered Ada more recently who don't always know the history (and of course it is great to see new people coming into the Ada fold). I personally have fought the fight to get open source software out for Ada from the start, well starting in the early 80's. At NYU, we wrote NYU Ada/Ed, the first validated Ada translator first in SETL, and then later translated into C. We had a big struggle to get the sources of this out. The DoD which was funding as at the time retained some data rights and wanted to try to make money (more accurately to get some of the money they had spent back) by selling the program through the national technical information service. Eventually we did succeed in releasing the sources, but it was really too late to be useful. Later in the 80's I made several trips down to Washington trying to interest DARPA in funding a free software Ada 83 compiler. I got some expression of interest, but basically DARPA was not that interested in Ada, and things never got anywhere. I considered it crucial for Ada's long term success that we have open source versions available for use in universities, but until Ada 95 came along I just could not convince anyone else that this was important. I spread the gospel of the importance of a free software approach to Ada 95 to Chris Anderson, and from my input, and from the input of many others, it was Chris who was finally persuaded that this made sense. The contract between the DoD and NYU for GNAT was rather amazing. Following my specific recommendations, it required the use of the GPL and LGPL (and indeed the entire text of the GPL is in the contract), and it also requires assignment of the copyright to FSF (I explained at the time why I thought it was important to get the copyright free of NYU, since some people at NYU, as at any other university, are more interested in making money off patents and copyrighted software than in promulgating free software. I knew that an assignment to the FSF would protect the continued free status, whatever NYU decided it wanted to do.) That's a rather *amazing* contract, and in retrospect, Chris was surprised that she succeeded in getting it past the legal and procurement scrutiny in the DoD. In fact I think it is a tremendous achievment, and I am not sure anyone else other than Chris could have managed it. The next big hurdle was the other Ada vendors. Chris thought they would be pleased at this development since it was clear to her it would aid the long term goals of Ada, but in fact several vendors went ballistic, since they felt that GNAT threatened their markets. Note that not all vendors felt this way, but some big important ones did, enough to make a serious problem (I will not name names at this stage, it is water under the bridge after all!) The whole project hung in the balance, but squeaked through by taking two steps: 1) eliminating validation 2) adding some siderals to the contract that eliminated funding for several features, enough so that the result could be seen to be crippled (the list included fixed point and subunits, and some other stuff I have forgotten). So things forged ahead. The validation did not really matter, although it is ironic that when it came to awarding the contract for the academic compiler, the main reason that Mike Feldman's proposal for a GNAT based solution was turned down was the lack of validation! He had a letter of commitment from ACT which existed by that time, of the intent to validate, but was told that ACT was not a sufficiently credible company to ensure validation -- a bit ironic as ACT is still the only company to have achieved full 100% validations of the core and all annexes :-) (by the way Mike [Feldman] if you read this and want to correct or elaborate, feel free!) As for the siderals, we found a way around this. Both I and Ed Schonberg had sabbaticals due at NYU, and we took them during the project. Instead of rushing off to some far away land and thinking high academic thoughts, as is often done during sabbaticals, we stayed at NYU, and worked on the missing features. Since NYU, and not the DoD, was paying our salaries, no one could complain that DoD money was being used for prohibited features, and that is how GNAT came to be 100% complete, despite the insistence of other vendors in these siderals in the contract! The GNAT contract ended after four years (the total by the way was about $3 million during this period, a small fraction of the total money that the DoD had spent in direct and indirect subsidy of other Ada efforts previously). That's when ACT was formed. The cast of characters was pretty much unchanged from the NYU days, and in many respects the spirit of the project continued unchanged. The three changes were 1) The acquisition of serious paying customers, with SGI playing a crucial role in embracing GNAT and its open source basis early on. 2) A serious commitment to validation, which had been prohibited during the period of the NYU contract. 3) A considerable increase in the scale of the project, supported by these paying customers. At NYU, we had the equivalent of 6-8 full time people, and ACT and ACTE now have more than double this number. As a result, development has continued without any more expenditure of tax payers money, and a nice synergy has arisen between the paying customers, who get a supported commercial product that they can use in major projects, and the users of the public version, who provide a large testing community, and help smoke out problems and also to suggest improvements, many of which suggestions have been adopted in successive versions of GNAT. We have continued to maintain the practice started at NYU of building public binary versions. Although of course the sources are fully available, for many users it is important to have prebuilt binary versions, hopefully nicely packaged for easy installation. Building and preparing these public release versions is certainly not zero effort, but they have had a significant role in increasing the spread and use of Ada, a goal that ACT (and I personally) is (am) committed to pursuing. Robert Dewar -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own