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

[Tyson Dowd]

On 08-Nov-1999, Dan Hazel <d.hazel at mailbox.uq.edu.au> wrote:
> 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.

We had quite a discussion of this.  What we want to avoid is being
caught up in the "many authors, no way to change the license" situation.
This system works well when we want to avoid annoying
situations where people contribute code and later on their boss makes
them retract it because they "don't give away Intellectual Property".
Or they refuse to let us dual-license the code (personally the
incompatibility of the GPL with other licenses makes me a little uneasy
about it, so I think dual-licensing is a possibility someday).

But it's a bit unfair to individuals who'd like to give, because it's
a little bit like saying "we don't trust you".  We realize this but we
don't think there is a way around it.  Perhaps we are a little
over-zealous when it comes to licensing -- most researchers take a
"devil-may-care" attitude that seems to work well for them ;-)

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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------