Re: Proving Correctness (was Java Portability)

["David Starner" <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org>]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in
message news:9krils$fcb$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> What FSF decides to do is their own business. What ACT decides to do is
> *their* own business. Right now ACT includes stuff (like AdaGIDE) in the
> public distribution that aren't part of the "formal" release of GNAT. If
you
> were to write some useful library of stuff and ACT put it out on the disk
> right next to GNAT how does that affect FSF?

Okay, but we were talking about stuff that travels with the compiler. During
my periods of Internet via modem and sneaker, I wouldn't download those
files unless I had to have them to run GNAT, or I later found I needed
them - and later I'd be as likely to run across some other package on a web
search. If it gets tossed on a shovelware CD, I'm likely to overlook them
completely.

> Hobbies are fine. However, I'd believe there is a better likelihood that
> products will get brought to market at a high quality if someone is doing
it
> for something a little more tangible than the satisfaction someone gets
from
> their hobby.

I'm not sure that's true. A lot of the good Open Source products compete not
necessarily on bells and whistles, but on quality and reliability - see NT
versus Linux, or IIS versus Apache.

> > But there are a number of people who have developed Ada libraries for
> > free.
>
> Never said there weren't. As a matter of fact, I've done that myself.
(O.K.
> I didn't put it out there under GPL, but I left a really strong hint about
> just how easy it would be to get permission from me to use the libraries.)

There's something to be said for no-hassle licensing, whether commerical or
free. I'd hesitate to use a library, or spend the time discussing using a
library unless it was unique, if I thought I might get a vague "go ahead"
and latter "that's not what I meant by go ahead."

> Probably they
> won't go for that, but if there were *some* way that the "volunteers" get
> something out of it (besides the warm fuzzy feeling) I bet the odds of
> getting it done and done well would go up. (Remember, there is a kind of
> business benefit to be had by some potential participants - so it doesn't
> necessarily have to be some financial transaction that creates the
> incentive.)

Okay. But I don't see the ADCL doing that. It's just too much of a crap
shoot making money of off it. Also, a lot of potential participants gain
from it being open source (me, ACT).

> All of those "what if" questions you ask are dealt with to some extent in
> the articles by Dr. Leif.

Do you have a link?

> To the extent that they aren't dealt with - I
> agree that they need to be dealt with. The ADCL is not a finished
product -
> it is a concept that is being kicked around and may ultimately emerge in
> some form different from what I've seen so far. The fact that there are
> questions and "what if" scenarios doesn't make it A Bad Thing. Go look
back
> at all the questions and "what ifs" that are discussed here and elsewhere
> concerning the GPL.

But there's a difference. The GPL very clearly stops you from distributing
copies without providing source in some way. The "what if"s - sure, you
might be able to evade the GPL if crosswire the COM ports and inject C#
particles, but there are very few parties who have tried, and if someone
gets away with it, you don't lose much. Money, on the other hand, has this
tendency to end up in the wrong pocket and get arguments over whose pocket
it belongs in. If it's just you, than great, but most programs are a lot of
work for a single programmer. If you're willing to form a buisness with your
fellow contributers, you've got the money issues cleared up some, but then
why the ADCL? If you've got 5 major contributers for places around the
world, with 12 minor contributers and a couple dozen bug fixers (like a
mid-sized Open Source project), you've got a problem you really need an
accountant to handle (but accountants get expensive.)

> (There were three of us who had the
> notion that a statistics package would be a good place to start

I'm curious - why? I'd start with the stuff that several others have put
into their standard libraries - look at the C++ standard libraries, the Java
standard libraries, what's ended up in libc, and take what's common that Ada
doesn't do well. I'd also look at the Ada libraries already written, and the
common points from them. I don't think a statistics package would come up #1
in that list.