Re: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24.txt [1/1]

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Richard Riehle (rriehle@nunic.nu.edu) wrote:

>   Java's democratic nature is a blessing for open exhange of ideas. It
>   would not lend itself easily to the protection of ideas.  When we want
>   to minimize the risk of sacrificing our intellectual property through
>   too easy public access, nothing does the job as well as Ada.


That's a very strange viewpoint. Of course we are not talking languages
here, as someone has pointed out, but rather typical environments.

In many ways you can see Java *precisely* as a means of protecting
intellectual property and aiding software hoarding. Suppose you want
to distribute a program that will run on all systems. In the past,
the easiest, indeed the only really practical way, to do this was
to distribute sources. Now with the universal availability of Java
byte code interpretors, you can distribute JBC, and avoid distributing
the source.

THe discussion about free vs proprietary software is of course one that
continues, and is not strictly relevant to this discussion, but claiming
that Java is a blow in the direction of freedom is truly ironic!

All in all, the quote from Richard is quite bizarre. Even with a friendly
interpretation, I can't make any sense out of it at all. Ada is a completely
open language. It has an international standard and NO ONE can lay claim to
any intellectual property rights in Ada itself. You can of course write
proprietary programs in Ada, but that is true of any language.

Richard, can you try to explain what on earth you mean here!