Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:rHML9.2286$c6.2634@bos-service2.ext.raytheon.com...
>
> Perhaps that's why they didn't let us do that, either.  :-)
>
Oh, I've been in on conversations where these sorts of things were
discussed. Pratt & Whitney had (still has) a toolset they were interested in
possibly farming out to a subcontractor at one or more times. The
discussions would go around and around and because of lack of consensus or
the unwillingness of anybody to put their neck on the line, inertia took
over and they never farmed out the tools. They wouldn't likely have found a
huge market, but if there were a handful of other users supporting a
development team, it would have defrayed the costs to Pratt and probably
given them more and better tools.

There was once something called the Software Productivity Consortium which
maybe once had some promise for being a mechanism by which the big companies
might have leveraged their efforts, but for reasons I didn't understand,
they refused to produce software (or even designs of software) and insisted
mostly on producing paper. Unfortunately, paper didn't really result in much
productivity imporvement. Had the companies agreed to jointly develop some
software tools instead, they might have got somewhere with it. That's why I
was thinking that some kind of "Ada Productivity Consortium" might achieve
what the SPC couldn't and help make Ada a better product for the whole world
at the same time.

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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        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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