Re: GWindows and a future home for it

["Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com>]

   I appreciate Marius' kind words.
   I apologize in advance for the length of my comments.  
   An example of the source of my continuing motivation to foster the
development of commercial products occurred today. FrameMaker 7.1 document
processor further increased my motivation when it unsuccessfully tried to
produce a Word file and scrambled some cross-references in the original file
of my latest chemistry patent application. For me this is a mission critical
application. In case anyone is interested, the cross-referencing and column
numbering technology in Word are unsuitable for this task.  Since FrameMaker
is expensive, my use of it establishes that like most scientists, I am
motivated to spend money on products. Lawyers and physicians also need
reliable products. 
   Previously, having been depressed by Ada's lack of commercial success and
frustrated by the unreliable and poor software I use at work (see above), I
came up with the obvious way to increase the commercial use of Ada; it was
to apply the old American adage, "Money talks". A few Ada millionaires would
be the best counterargument to the C group of languages aficionados. 
   One simple business observation about the largest software corporation,
Microsoft, is that the company has very nice buildings and treats its
employees very well. In short, there is a very significant overhead and
salary component in its costs. 
   Ada technology fortunately provides a means to eliminate most of the
corporate building and overhead costs and to change the economic model of
software development from a centralized to a decentralized structure.  In
fact, Randy Brukardt and Tom Moran have demonstrated with CLAW the
feasibility of distributed Ada development. I believe that with Ada because
of its readability, use of separate specifications, etc. the scaling from 2
developers to 100 or 1,000 distributed developers is possible. Ada also has
the advantage that the number of developers required is inversely
proportional to their productivity. However, these technological advantages
do not provide a sufficient business case for the use of Ada.
   The use of Ada has the very large commercial advantage in that an ASIS
program can be created that divides up the royalties paid to the developers.
This will remove very significant legal and accounting costs as well as
upfront capital investment. A software based method to calculate
compensation will permit the use of down-stream and evolved or mutated
software components. If a product is successful, it will assure the upstream
developers obtain a good return for their initial effort.
   As we all know, software design is a critical component. Frankly, it
would be a very high-risk undertaking to start a business composed of
software experts who had minimal domain knowledge of a commercial product.
   However, this risk factor is mitigated by the use of existing
well-thought-out designs. We are now well along in what is an XML centric
market. If we build products that are based on the World Wide Web Consortium
standards, much of the design and domain knowledge problems are mitigated.
This type of development is further simplified by the semantic similarity
between Ada and XML schema.  I also have a gut feeling that Ada program
designers would realize that there was significant commonality between a
table in document and a spreadsheet. I suspect that a simple object based
design could result in much smaller and fast packages.
   Since we already have the Commercial Ada Users Working Group (CAUWEG), I
can think of no better aim for CAUWEG than the commercial use of Ada.
   Yours,
   Bob Leif
   
   
   Message: 4
   Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 22:28:36 +0100
   
   From: Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt>
   Subject: Re: GWindows and a future home for it
   To: comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org
   Message-ID: <41646384.6030805@netcabo.pt>
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
   
   Hyman Rosen wrote:
   
   > ... the practical problems of
   > such "fair source" licenses will doom them.
    > ... The weight of legal and
   > accounting requirements to track these is just as heavy
   > as for closed-source packages.
   
   In that case I see no problem, because proprietary software does not 
   seem to be suffering from this :-)
   
   Of course managing shares in fair source is more complicated than in 
   open source--where there are none. But we think it can be done, and 
   we're working toward putting some tools in place for it. See for example 
   the Relative Credit Scheme and the respective provisions in Bob Leif's 
   Ada Developers Cooperative License.
   
   > ... Just because some programmer wants to make money does not
   > obligate anyone else to march to his drumbeat.
   
   Well, you can just say it the other way around: if some programmer does 
   not want to make money...
   
   Anyway in fair source any author can forfeit his right to be rewarded.
   
   Thanks for your time and knowledge. I'll take a look at the Id Sender 
   business.