On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Glenn Fowler <glenn.s.fow...@gmail.com> wrote: > As has been pointed out several times on the AST and UWIN lists, AT&T gives > very little support to OpenSouce software, which is why we have so few > people involved with our rather large collection of AST software. In spite > of this, ksh, nmake, vczip, UWIN and other AST tools continue to be used in > several AT&T projects. > > It turns out that software isn't the only thing lacking support: both dgk > (AT&T fellow, 36 years of service) and gsf (AT&T fellow, 29 years of > service) have been terminated, effective October 10. Our third major > partner, Phong Vo (AT&T fellow, 32 years of service), left a few months ago > for Google. The UWIN maintainer, Jeff Fellin, is still with AT&T and > provides UWIN support for some critical operations. > > Both dgk and gsf will continue to work on AST software, and might actually > have more time (at least in the short run) to focus on it. > > The download site and mail groups will remain within AT&T for at least the > next several months. Our AT&T colleague, dr.ek, AST user and bug detector, > will maintain the site. We have secured the astopen.org domain and are > investigating non-AT&T hosting options, including a repository with bug > tracking. > > The process of change will take time; the patience of the user community > will be greatly appreciated. Its quite a shock to have 3 weeks to plan > personal, career, and hacking futures after working in an environment that > has essentially been stable for almost 30 years. The user groups will be > informed as plans solidify.
This is quite a shock, but detail analysis shows that AT&T was fixed down that path for at least the last 4-5 years. Research was ongoing but it appeared to be disconnected from what the rest of AT&T was doing and neither was the "rest" much interested what AT&T Research was doing. Such a disconnect is unhealthy for both sides. But... this is all not important right now. First question is: Can the community help? Second question is: What will happen to the AST and UWIN projects? Both have solid and good codebases, but almost no market share, which is mostly an issue that (compared to GNU, GNU coreutils or Cygwin) no lobbying happens. Each time a major or minor feature hits in GNU territory a lot of fuzz is made while AST and UWIN do... nothing, except a small entry in RELEASE. The other notable problem is the lack of community integration, with the top items being a public bug tracker, a public GIT or Subversion repository where development happens (the old GIT tree was a joke because only releases showed up there, what's needed is that you do individual commits there) and a software library for UWIN. Irek _______________________________________________ ast-developers mailing list ast-developers@lists.research.att.com http://lists.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/ast-developers
