[mercury-users] Microsoft's financial support

[Tyson Dowd]

On 05-Nov-1999, Marko Schuetz <marko at ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de> wrote:
> Fergus> Melbourne, I would like to take this opportunity to thank
> Fergus> Microsoft for their generous financial support.
> 
> Fergus> I'm afraid that the details of the project remain confidential
> Fergus> at this point, but they will be made public in due course.
> 
> I had thought that something like this could not happen! Well, I had
> hoped, assuming the Mercury group is aware of the Halloween documents,
> Roberto DiCosmo's "CyberSnare" and "Hijacking the World" and some well
> thought out posts concerning licensing/software patents by some group
> members.

(my opinions, my comments, my mistakes, nothing official here, nothing
to see here, move along)

I believe we are pretty aware of the issues involved.  Taking a grant
from Microsoft doesn't do anything to negate the licensing conditions
that Mercury is distributed under.  We still have a daily released under
the GPL/LGPL licensing conditions that Mercury has had for ages.

Microsoft Research is a huge funding agency in programming language
research these days.  Many full time researchers/developers working on
Haskell actually work at Microsoft Research.  However, these same people
have revised the licensing conditions of GHC to make it completely
open-source (in fact, it's got a BSD-like license) while employed there. 
The MLj compiler is a GPL-ed compiler which is also being worked on by
two two Microsoft Research employees.

Commercial confidentiality agreements are common in business practice
and I see no real harm in accepting one with a time limit.  Especially
when it means in return you get a bunch of money with which to develop
open-source software. 

Even if you hate the company, please consider that we are spending their
money on free software.  Consider it as a kind of Robin Hood thing ;-)

Tyson.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
post:  mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------