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

[Dan Hazel]

Tyson Dowd writes:
 > 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.
 > 
 > ...
 > 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.

The existence of a rotd is a Bazaar-like property.
However my impression is that contributions from outside MU 
won't be folded in if they are GPLed, but must have been formally
placed in the public domain.  The rationale is that the flexibilty
of being able to change the licence needs to be retained.
This is very Cathedral-like.  The form you'll be sent if you have
a small contribution is even adapted from the FSF form.

In this way, this implementation benefits from the advantages
of the GPL without being snared by it.  I'm not trying to
label this as either good or bad.

 > ...
 > 
 > 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.

The possibility of development support not being renewed can exert
substantial influence.

Dan Hazel
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