Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:0YkL9.2262$c6.2398@bos-service2.ext.raytheon.com...
>
> Seemed like it to me.  But contact Lockheed-Martin, Boxo 4840, Syracuse,
NY
> for the details.  They do not seem to be agressively marketing it.
> I did not work directly on RTDB and I left GE/Martin/Lockheed before
> the successor, FIRM, came along.  But I liked what I read about both.
> One thing I _did_ work on there was, in the opinion of several of us,
> a very useful testing tool.  We tried to get the company to market it,
> and we were told "We are not a tools business."
>
That's a common problem with the larger contractors out there. They develop
something for internal use because they couldn't make do with what was
commercially available, but they are not in the position to market what they
have built. They'd almost be better off spinning off a software company to
which they dump the things they build for further development. Getting a
commercial base for it means they don't have to be the sole supporters of
all future development. The model still has problems - you don't get
guarantees that the development will go exactly the way you'd like and your
competitors suddenly gain access to the tools that were maybe instrumental
in helping you get the business you really wanted. But life is full of
tradeoffs.

However, that does bring up an interesting possibility in the way of finding
funding for various Ada enhancement projects. There are a number of large
institutional users of Ada who might be willing to toss some money at an
"Ada Productivity Consortium" - the goal of which would be to build Ada
related tools and libraries that would then be made generally available.
Glomming onto what might already be there and then enhancing it as a joint
effort might be a way for them to get what they want/need and have it
incorporated in with compilers & development kits. A few million bucks from
the likes of LockMart, Boeing, GE, Pratt, et alia, is a spit in the bucket
to them as long as they thought they would get something they could use out
of it. Hmmmm......

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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