[mercury-users] Microsoft's recent decl. of support?

[Tyson Dowd]

On 06-Nov-1999, Samuel Sean Watkins <108703 at bud.cc.swin.edu.au> wrote:
> I hope we're not going to accept.  Would that be amoral?  Please, try to 
> keep Mercury a pure language crafted by individuals out of love for it, 
> don't let it become commercial junk product - and don't take money.

(these are personal comments, please don't construe anything official
from this, any mistakes are my own)

I'm afraid that the Mercury project has been "taking money" for years,
mostly in the form of government grants and postgraduate scholarships
provided by the Australian government and Melbourne University 
(Australian Research Council, Australian Postgraduate Awards, etc). 
The bulk of the Mercury system has been contributed by a core group who
have worked on it full time for nearly 6 years.  This group has grown
from 3 to about 10 people during this time.

More recently parts have been contributed by other research universities
around the world, and by a few forward thinking companies by way of an
EU grant, and contributions have started coming in from user/developers
from who seem to be working either on company time or on their own spare
time, or both.  In total I suspect well over a million Australian
dollars of "taken money" so far.

Although many of these full-time people do it for the "love of it"
(since they could almost certainly earn double or triple their current
wages in "industry"), without money this kind of work would not have
happened.  That the project has now progressed to the point where
third-party contributions are possible is I believe due to the fact that
was is there now is a nearly full working system.  I don't think we
would have got to this critical point without money, simply because the
project is too large and complex to start from scratch with small
contributions from many individuals.  See Eric Raymond's essay "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar" for more insight into why this initial
development is important for open-source projects.

This money lead to a great language, with very liberal licensing
conditions.  If big rich companies give us more money, then we would
like to do more of the same.  

Sooner or later Mercury was going to attract the attention of large
companies (if it didn't, it would be a failure).  If these companies
want to give grants, that's *good*.  The licensing of Mercury is such
that even if such grants were an attempt to "buy" the language out, a
free version would still remain.  And in general such companies have
little interest in changing the licensing conditions -- there's
currently not a lot of profit in selling a new programming language.

The more likely scenario is that a company wants to use the language, or
have someone modify the language to make it more useful to them.  The
more people using Mercury, the more people know about it, and the more
likely new code will be provided that will be folded into future
versions of Mercury.  And even if the work the grant enabled turns out
to be a dead end, these grants can pay for maintenance, machine
resources and overheads that would otherwise go begging.

So in summary, I don't think it's immoral simply to accept money from a
company.  I think it would be stupid to turn down money if there are few
strings attached, and you think you could do a lot of good with that
money.  

I would expect that if anyone is offered money to work on Mercury, they
judge the offer, the benefits and the possible attached strings and
decide what they think is right.

Tyson.
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