---------- Sucky Software I've followed this thread with interest. Several posters have put the case for a balance being needed between the quality and cost of a piece of software. I'd like, very briefly, to note here that my own antipathy towards 'sucky' software is based mainly on ethical considerations rather than economic ones. It is my assertion that the number of categories of software in use in our society which are critical (to people's health, lives, livelihoods, and well-being) is steadily increasing. To such obvious categories as aircraft flight control software and computerised medical devices could be added Internet service software (keeping people's credit card numbers secure, for example), multi-media decoding software (upon which many entertaineers' careers can become dependent), operating systems (upon which other critical software ends up becoming dependent), and a plethora of others. To my mind, it is should not be acceptable that economic forces alone determine the quality of this critical software, in the same way that such forces should not solely control, for example, aircraft safety or medical practice. One might claim that the forces of litigation form a good, and perhaps sufficient, economic balance. I'm not arguing for or against this, but if it's to be the model for our society (and I'm lumping the US and UK together here :-o ;-) I'd like to see software consumers become more litigious. ---------- GPL Some strong views have been expressed here about the GPL, as ever. I'd like to throw in some of my thoughts. I believe the real legal effect of the GPL is a somewhat nebulous thing, since (to my knowledge) it has never been tested in any court, yet. This is my own greatest concern about the GPL. Describing the GPL as "a wrecker of intellectual property", whilst essentially true, could be countered (at the opposite extreme) by an accusation against intellectual property (its concept and enforcement) as being a wrecker of social responsibility and/or scientific ethics. To use more emotive language, one might accuse it of being a "mandate for greed". Now, I wish to emphasise, that my own viewpoint falls somewhere between these two extremes: I am in favour of an enforced system of intellectual property, but I feel that the current typical regime (e.g. in the US and in the UK) needs to be 'reigned back' somewhat (e.g. being stricter in the granting of patents, and granting 'short' patents for certain processes); I prefer a pragmatic attitude to intellectual property, as opposed to 'religious' arguments. As for publicly funded software being released under the GPL, I agree with others who have posted on the subject that it would be right to do so in some cases, and not in others. In a case where it would be necessary for the project to be under the GPL in order to attract the kind of contributors it needed to succeed, then clearly it would be silly not to do so. On the other hand, in a case where the value of the project to society would be (likely to be) substantially diminished by releasing it under the GPL, it would clearly be folly to do so. Surely what is needed is good decision-making on a case-by-case basis, not a fixed policy one way or the other? ---------- Quick & Dirty Interfaces J. F. Harrison made a point close to my heart, as the AdaOS project will inevitably need a 'QDI' capability. Ada can sometimes be an excellent prototyping and 'quickie' language, but there are certain basic characteristics of Ada that often make it unsuitable for QDIs: (1) Ada is not really 'reflective', a property valuable to a RAD environment, in that it that it makes it easier to manipulate and extend the environment according to the developer's taste and special requirements; (2) the Ada language is very verbose, which is as inappropriate for 'quickie' programs as it is advantageous for longer-lived ones; (3) Ada is not interactive, and an interactive morphology (e.g. ACE) tends to end up being substantially different to the compiled language whilst retaining much of the the unwanted verbosity. I am favouring a 'tiny' form of Smalltalk, at the moment, to fulfil a QDI/RAD/VDE/shell/macro-language role in AdaOS. Remember, AdaOS will be based heavily on CORBA, and the OMG-defined Smalltalk CORBA interface is pretty neat. Comments welcome. -- Nick Roberts http://www.AdaOS.org