🚀 go-pugleaf

mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at writes:

>I am not sure whether we can compare these two developments with OCAML. I
>would consider "OCAML" and most (all?) other functional languages as
>quite "fragile": their "market share" is extremely small. If commercial
>firms were allowed to just rip out all good stuff to brush up their
>inferior products (in this case: Java compilers) this could well lead
>to a problem. It could draw away the still low attention of the public.

This would be a shame, perhaps, but nowhere near as much of a shame as
if OCAML disappears, taking all the good stuff with it, never to be
seen again until someone reinvents the wheel.

IMHO far too many research projects die and take all the work done on
them with them.  Far too many papers are published on systems that
several years later are completely abandoned.  The source code remains
under a restrictive copyright, and so is useless to future researchers.

>If there is hardly any competition, this does not apply. E.g. I'd say
>there is/was no real competition to Emacs - the split didn't hurt,
>better: it helped the project. In the case of GNU C / EGCS: both are
>just direct substitutes for commercial products and there are a lot of
>better commercial C/C++-compilers. C/C++ (unfortunately?) wouldn't die
>out if EGCS / GNU C ceased to exist. But if people used Java instead of
>OCAML because of technology-transfer (OCAML->Java), I'd regard this as a
>loss not only to the FP-community but to software development in general.

I would hope that OCAML has more to offer the FP-community than a
few implementation features that can be transferred into Java.

If all OCAML has to offer to the FP community is technology that can
be transferred into other languages, then it's obvious that the language
itself is not important -- probably the best thing that can happen for
anyone is technology transfer.  It would certainly save other
researchers working on other languages from re-implementing those
features.

If you are really concerned about one-way technology transfers, than GPL
your code.  Anyone who takes your technology and uses it will have to
license their changes under the GPL so you can also use their changes.

--
Tyson.