[mercury-users] Microsoft's financial support

[Marko Schuetz]

(to spare me from writing "IMHO" all too often: this is just my humble
opinion) 

>>>>> "Fergus" == Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au> writes:

Fergus> |	There's nothing wrong with taking money away from Microsoft.
Fergus> |		-Richard Stallman.

I couldn't agree more. But it's not the whole story: there is a NDA
about the details of the deal, so one thing that was sold is the
ability to speak freely about the details of the deal and have them
openly criticized or applauded (or whatever else people would like to
do). 

>>>>> "Tyson" == Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> writes:

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

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

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

\begin{speculation} 

If I were to put on my hypothetical Microsoft hat for a moment and
think about the poor growth of Windows NT/95/98/... in academia, say
programming language education. Then I spot an interesting very
promising language development, that has evolved into a stable project
and has attracted some very talented contributors around the world
(mercury). How could I apply the company philosophy ("embrace and
extend") to this project to help Windows marketing? I could offer some
money to some of the researchers involved. If then I can channel some
of these researchers efforts towards some of my companys proprietary
protocols and technologies, I will already have some extension
availably on windows, but not on another platform and, as we all know,
once this is implemented, implementing the same features using open
protocols and technologies will be much less prestigeous than the
original work. 

...and so on and so forth...

\end{speculation}

Tyson> Commercial confidentiality agreements are common in business
                                                           !!!!!!!!

They are quite uncommon in free software and open-source software. 

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

Tyson> Even if you hate the company, please consider that we are

Not me.

Tyson> spending their money on free software.  Consider it as a kind
Tyson> of Robin Hood thing ;-)

Don't get me wrong: I do think that these are honorable motives and I
think it is a great thing to support free software. I don't believe
that these are Microsofts motives. And you are taking a high risk
meeting them on their (legal/financial/marketing) turf.

On the side, it isn't the Robin Hood thing: He *robbed* the rich ones
to give to the poor and did not have any written agreement with them
be it an NDA or other.

Marko
-- 
Marko Schütz            marko at cs.uni-frankfurt.de
http://www.ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~marko/
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