>>>>> "Mark" == Mark P Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Mark> One of the greatest disappointments to date of the move
Mark> to more liberal (i.e. free software) licenses for systems
Mark> like Hugs and GHC, is that it has done almost nothing to
Mark> stimulate contributions to the implementations themselves
Mark> from outside the immediate (and small) group of developers
Maybe I am too optimistic, but IMHO we're merely much earlier in the
process of spreading functional language use. It has taken the Haskell
community quite some time to switch to liberal licenses. IIRC only
Hugs used to come with a license at all, neither hbc, ghc nor nhc used
to have one for quite some time. (Compare this to the mercury team who
have distributed their compiler with the GPL from when I first became
aware of its existence.)
Mark> concerned. Compare this, for example, with the Linux
Mark> community where the number of external contributors is
Mark> often cited as one of the benefits of the development
Linux has been distributed with liberal licensing (here: GPL) from the
very beginning. Linus mentioned the GPL as Linux' license as early as
August 91 on comp.os.minix. So if I were to merely compare the date
any Haskell compiler was available with an explicit liberal license
then we are still very early in the process of spreading Haskell.
Hopefully this will turn out to spread exponentially...
Mark> So perhaps we should be more explicit: I'm sure that all of
Mark> us involved in developing Haskell systems would welcome
Mark> contributions from the community that will help to make the
Mark> tools better. Better tools will benefit the whole community,
Mark> and will make them accessible and useful to a much wider
Mark> audience.
Mark> This doesn't mean that people shouldn't post bug reports
Mark> or gripes about the systems --- the poster may not know
Mark> how to fix the problems, but perhaps their message will
Mark> inspire somebody else to tackle it. But I do think that
Mark> we need to move away from a "them and us"/"developer and user"
Mark> picture, and towards a more community oriented "us".
I know this takes time and effort, but it would surely help to make
the ongoing development of the Haskell implementations as transparent
as possible. E.g. a (maybe central for all the implementations) gnats
database of open bugs/problems with their state, which is accessible for
everyone, etc.
Marko
--
Marko Schütz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~marko/
