Hi David,

for the past several years OCI, Remedy, Riverace, and Prismtech have taken turns doing the releases every 4-5 months or so.  See the release announcements for examples of this.  If you haven't noticed any changes then the process must be working well :)

Doug

--- Original Message ---
From:"David Hauck" <davidh@netacquire.com>
Sent:Thu 5/31/07  6:55 pm
To:"Douglas C. Schmidt" <schmidt@dre.vanderbilt.edu>,ace-users@cse.wustl.edu,tao-users@cse.wustl.edu
Subj:RE: [ace-users] Would you like ACE to run great on your platform?

Hi Doug,

> Hi Folks,
>
>    Recent postings from Steve Huston and Johnny Willemsen reminded me
> I wanted to clarify a few things about the way in which support works
> for ACE+TAO+CIAO.  In the beginning (i.e., 1995 to 2003 or so),
> ACE+TAO were sponsored by companies and government agencies interested
> in doing R&D on middleware for distributed real-time and embedded
> systems.  During this phase, the DOC group had many staff/students who
> were funded to work on ACE+TAO and since the sponsors were motivated
> to create useful technology we had their blessing to spend some of our
> time supporting the user community, e.g., answering questions, fixing
> bugs, providing support for a wide range of OS/compiler/hardware
> platforms.
>
>    Now that ACE+TAO have matured our R&D sponsors are interested in
> funding new things, hence our work the past 3-4 years on model-driven
> engineering tools, CIAO/DAnCE, DDS, SOA, etc.  While these new
> projects are going quite well, the DOC group no longer has any funding
> to work directly on ACE+TAO,

Could you please fill me in on who controls when/how new ACE/TAO betas/releases occur? Perhaps this has already been handed over to
someone else and I just haven't noticed it ;)?

Thanks,
-David

> though of course we still use it heavily
> for our CIAO/DAnCE and DDS projects.  Fortunately, companies like OCI,
> PrismTech, Remedy, and Riverace are now well established providers of
> commercial support for ACE+TAO, and handle the bulk of the day-to-day
> new features and maintenance of the software.
>
>    The upshot of all this is that the ACE+TAO user community needs to
> understand that things they used to get for "free" (i.e., because
> someone else paid for it), such as supported platforms, quick turn
> around on bug fixes, etc. are now going to happen largely if
>
> . Users volunteer to do the bulk of the work and the QA and/or
>
> . The DOC group gets new sponsors to fund our work on ACE+TAO.
>
> As a result, I strongly encourage people to avail themselves of the
> services offered by the ACE+TAO commercial support providers if you
> have needs that go above and beyond what's already in the existing
> open-source baseline.
>
> Thanks,
>
>         Doug
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt                       Professor and Associate Chair
> Electrical Engineering and Computer Science  TEL: (615) 343-8197
> Vanderbilt University                        WEB: www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt
> Nashville, TN 37203                          NET: d.schmidt@vanderbilt.edu
>
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