[SystemSafety] On open-sourcing coding standards

[Rod Chapman]

 On 2018-09-18 20:27, Olwen Morgan wrote:
> I have some sympathy with the idea that coding standards ought to be
> part of the open-source world

I largely agree, but you have to be very careful to define what you mean by
"open-source" in this context.

Do you mean, for example:
1. "Available for anyone to read free-of-charge"
or perhaps
2. "a community-based development approach, accepting contributions from
all comers..."

You also need to completely seprate the licensing and development model of
a coding standard/language definition from those of the tools that claim to
implement it...

Take SPARK for example... the language definition documents for SPARK 83
thru SPARK 2005 were always freely available to anyone that asked, since
they were jointly under UK Crown Copyright.

The SPARK 2014 language definition is jointly maintained by Altran and
AdaCore, but under a more commutity-style process, and licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation Licence. The latest snapshot is always here:
http://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/lrm/

 - Rod
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