Re: Guest account at Center for Software Reuse

[saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net !sol.ctr.columbia.edu!eff!world!srctran@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Gregory Aharonian)]

John Goodenough comments on my comments about excessive SEI and CSRO secrecy:

>I can't resist mentioning that the primary benefit of this rule is to
>eliminate theft of computer equipment, of which we have a lot!  Imagine the
>(accurate) charge of "incompetence" that would be levied if we were regularly
>ripped off!  (People do enter the building and use the facilities unescorted
>once they have been vouched for by someone on the staff.)

This is still a pathetic excuse.  In my efforts to track all of the
government's resuable software (over 20,000 programs at latest count,
not that anyone really cares about the government's software) I have
visited most of the DoE, NASA, and many DoD facilities such as Argonne
National Laboratory in Chicago, Ames Research Center at Moffett Field,
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Air Force Geophysical Library at
Hanscom field, as well as many universities such as MIT, Berkeley, UCSD,
Rice, and Department of Commerce Facilities such as NIST in Gaithersburg.
At most, all I ever have to do is sign in (name and address) to get 
pretty much free access to all of the facilities (except of obviously
secret offices or laboratories with complex equipment setups).  At all
of these places, I have access to all types of equipment, especially
much more expensive stuff than that at SEI.  So this equipment protection
excuse is very lame.

Also, in tracking all of the government's software (and building a process
to do so, again not that any of the tax wastinf reuse people care), I have
had access to a variety of computer systems at these facilities, much over
the Internet through anonymous FTP.  For all of these computer systems, my
access to their systems was restricted to the public areas they controlled,
a small price to pay to get access.  They protect what they want to protect,
they make available what they want to make available.  So the CSRO excuse
about taking their systems off line for secrecy reasons is also pathetic.

It borders on criminality all of these DoD reuse efforts that have been
unable to make use of the Internet to provide easy access to reusable Ada
software, either through a service like NETLIB, postings to alt.sources.ada,
or anonymous ftp.  It's one of the reasons (not that anyone cares) that
C and C++ are leaving Ada in the reusable dust.  There is hundreds of 
megabytes of C/C++ software floating over the Internet everyday, without
needing the millions of dollars flushed down the drain of Ada reuse efforts.


Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization
617-489-3727   (call I can't bite you over the telephone!)
-- 
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Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimiztion
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178