An Airbus aircraft has a working life of up to 30 years. On-board hardware and software needs to be maintained, updated and adapted to new specifications for the same amount of time. However, 30 years is an eternity in the short-lived software industry. Which software vendor can nowadays guarantee that their tools will still be usable and meet all the relevant requirements in 2030? And the production path from system specifications to tested control programs and the hardware to run them on requires many tools.
Led by aircraft manufacturer Airbus, several companies located in the French Aerospace Valley close to Toulouse have, therefore, formed a consortium and initiated the TOPCASED Open Source project to create the necessary system development tools. TOPCASED is an acronym for Toolkit in Open source for Critical Applications & Systems Development.
07 February 2008
Open Source Airbus
I always knew that that the A380 Airbus was cool:
And all 3 Ada developers rejoiced.
ReplyDeleteI jest, of course.
Cruel, very cruel....
ReplyDeleteADA doesn't make news very often because it isn't the nature of ADA to have a pretty little hype machine. While working at Honeywell in the Sensor and Guidance Products, I was a minority for writing code with C++.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, there were at least 100 ADA developers.
So... 3? yeah, in the media, maybe, but not everyone sucks javabeans and kisses Microsoft to get Mono. :-)